Essays in London 

and 

Elsewhere 



BY 



HENRY JAMES 




NEW YORK 






HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 



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Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. 
All rights reseniei. 



NOTE 

The first of these Papers was written with a cer- 
tain reference to the admirable illustrations, by Mr. 
Pennell, with which on its original appearance in 
The Century it was accompanied. When the notice 
of Pierre Loti and that of MM. de Goncourt were 
first published (in The Fortnightly -Review) the latest 
volumes of these authors had not appeared. 



I 

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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

London i 

James Russell Lowell 44 

Frances Anne Kemble 81 

Gustave Flaubert 121 

Pierre Loti 151 

The Journal of the Brothers de Goncourt . 186 
Browning in Westminster Abbey .... 222 

Henrik Ibsen 230 

Mrs. Humphry Ward 253 

Criticism * . . . 259 

An Animated Conversation 267 



Pts 



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LONDON 



There is a certain evening that I count as virtually 
a first impression — the end of a wet, black Sunday, 
twenty years ago, about the first of March. There 
had been an earlier vision, but it had turned gray, 
like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of was a 
fresh beginning. No doubt I had a mystic presci- 
ence of how fond of the murky modern Babylon I was 
one day to become ; certain it is that as I look back 
I find every small circumstance of those hours of ap- 
proach and arrival still as vivid as if the solemnity 
of an opening era had breathed upon it. The sense 
of approach was already almost intolerably strong at 
Liverpool, where, as I remember, the perception of 
the English character of everything was as acute as 
a surprise, though it could only be a surprise without 
a shock. It was expectation exquisitely gratified- 
superabundantly confirmed. There was a kind of 
wonder, indeed, that England should be as English 
as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be ; 
but the wonder would have been greater, and all the 
pleasure absent, if the sensation had not been violent. 
It seem? to sit there again like a visiting presence, as 



ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 



it sat opposite to me at breakfast at a small table 
a window of the old coffee-room of the Adelphi Hotel 
— the unextended (as it then was), the unimproved, 
the unblushingly local Adelphi. Liverpool is not a 
romantic city, but that smoky Saturday returns to me 
as a supreme success, measured by its association 
with the kind of emotion in the hope of which, for 
the most part, we betake ourselves to far countries. 

It assumed this character at an early hour — or 
rather, indeed, twenty- four hours before— with the 
sight, as one looked across the wintry ocean, of the 
strange, dark, lonely freshness of the coast of Ire- 
land. Better still, before we could come up to the 
city, were the black steamers knocking about in the 
yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed 
to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest, 
windiest light. Spring was already in the air, in the 
town ; there was no rain, but there was still less sun 
— one wondered what had become, on this side of the 
world, of the big white splotch in the heavens ; and 
the gray mildness, shading away into black at every 
pretext, appeared in itself a promise. This was how 
it hung about me, between the window and the lire, 
in the coffee-room of the hotel — late in the morning 
for breakfast, as we had been long disembarking. The 
other passengers had dispersed, knowingly catching 
trains for London (we had only been a handful) ; I 
had the place to myself, and I felt as if I had an ex- 
clusive property in the impression. I prolonged it, I 
sacrificed to it, and it is perfectly recoverable now, 
with the very taste of the national muffin, the creak 



LONDON 3 

of the waiter's shoes as he came and went (could 
anything be so English as his intensely professional 
back ? it revealed a country of tradition), and the 
rustle of the newspaper I was too excited to read. 

I continued to sacrifice for the rest of the day; 
it didn't seem to me a sentient thing, as yet, to in- 
quire into the means of getting away. My curiosity 
must indeed have languished, for I found myself on 
the morrow in the slowest of Sunday trains, pottering 
up to London with an interruptedness which might 
have been tedious without the conversation of an old 
gentleman who shared the carriage with me arid to 
whom my alien as well as comparatively youthful 
character had betrayed itself. He instructed me as 
to the sights of London, and impressed upon me 
that nothing was more worthy of my attention than 
the great cathedral of St. Paul. " Have you seen St. 
Peter's in, Rome ? St. Peter's is more highly embel- 
lished, you know ; but you may depend upon it that 
St. Paul's is the better building of the two." The 
impression I began with speaking of was, strictly, 
that of the drive from Euston, after dark, to Morley's 
Hotel in Trafalgar Square. It was not lovely — it 
was in fact rather horrible ; but as I move again 
through dusky, tortuous miles, in the greasy four- 
wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me to 
commit myself, I recognize the first step in an initia- 
tion of which the subsequent stages were to abound 
in pleasant things. It is a kind of humiliation in a 
great city not to know where you are going, and Mor- 
ley's Hotel was then, to my imagination, only a vague 



4 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

ruddy spot in the general immensity. The immensity 
was the great fact, and that was a charm ; the miles 
of housetops and viaducts, the complication of junc- 
tions and signals through which the train made its 
way to the station had already given me the scale. 
The weather had turned to wet, and we went deeper 
and deeper into the Sunday night. The sheep in 
the fields, on the way from Liverpool, had shown in 
their demeanor a certain consciousness of the day ; 
but this momentous cab-drive was an introduction to 
rigidities of custom. The low black houses were as 
inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save 
where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there 
was a flare of light more brutal still than the dark- 
ness. The custom of gin — that was equally rigid, 
and in this first impression the public-houses counted 
for much. 

Morley's Hotel proved indeed to be a ruddy spot ; 
brilliant, in my recollection, is the coffee-room fire, 
the hospitable mahogany, the sense that in the 
stupendous city this, at any rate for the hour, was a 
shelter and a point of view. My remembrance of 
the rest of the evening — I was probably very tired — 
is mainly a remembrance of a vast four-poster. My 
little bedroom candle, set in its deep basin, caused 
this monument to project a huge shadow and to 
make me think, I scarce knew why, of " The Ingolds- 
by Legends." If at a tolerably early hour the next 
day I found myself approaching St. Paul's, it was 
not wholly in obedience to the old gentleman in the 
railway-carriage: I had an errand in the City, and 



LONDON 5 

the City was doubtless prodigious. But what I 
mainly recall is the romantic consciousness of pass- 
ing under Temple Bar and the way two lines of 
"Henry Esmond" repeated themselves in my mind as 
I drew near the masterpiece of Sir Christopher Wren. 
" The stout, red-faced woman " whom Esmond had 
seen tearing after the stag-hounds over the slopes at 
Windsor was not a bit like the effigy " which turns 
its stony back upon St. Paul's and faces the coaches 
struggling up Ludgate Hill." As I looked at Queen 
Anne over the apron of my hansom — she struck me 
as very small and dirty, and the vehicle ascended 
the mild incline without an effort — it was a thrilling 
thought that the statue had been familiar to the hero 
of the incomparable novel. All history appeared to 
live again, and the continuity of things to vibrate 
through my mind. 

To this hour, as I pass along the Strand, I take 
again the walk I took there that afternoon. I love 
the place to-day, and that was the commencement 
of my passion. It appeared to me to present phe- 
nomena and to contain objects of every kind, of an 
inexhaustible interest ; in particular it struck me as 
desirable and even indispensable that I should pur- 
chase most of the articles in most of the shops. My 
eyes rest with a certain tenderness on the places 
where I resisted and on those where I succumbed. 
The fragrance of Mr. Rimmel's establishment is again 
in my nostrils ; I see the slim young lady (I hear 
her pronunciation) who waited upon me there. Sa- 
cred to me to-day is the particular aroma of the 



6 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

hair-wash that I bought of her. I pause before the 
granite portico of Exeter Hall (it was unexpectedly 
narrow and wedge-like), and it evokes a cloud of 
associations which are none the less impressive be- 
cause they are vague ; coming from I don't know 
where — from Punch, from Thackeray, from old vol- 
umes of the Illustrated London News turned over 
in childhood ; seeming connected with Mrs. Beecher 
Stowe and " Uncle Tom's Cabin." Memorable is a 
rush I made into a glover's at Charing Cross — the 
one you pass going eastward, just before you turn 
into the station ; that, however, now that I think of 
it, must have been in the morning, as soon as I 
issued from the hotel. Keen within me was a sense 
of the importance of deflowering, of despoiling the 
shop. 

A day or two later, in the afternoon, I found 
myself staring at my fire, in a lodging of which I 
had taken possession on foreseeing that I should 
spend some weeks in London. I had just come in, 
and, having attended to the distribution of my lug- 
gage, sat down to consider my habitation. It was 
on the ground floor, and the fading daylight reached 
it in a sadly damaged condition. It struck me as 
stuffy and unsocial, with its mouldy smell and its 
decoration of lithographs and wax-flowers — an im- 
personal black hole in the huge general blackness. 
The uproar of Piccadilly hummed away at the end 
of the street, and the rattle of a heartless hansom 
passed close to my ears. A sudden horror of the 
whole place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of 



LONDON 7 

homesickness which had been watching its moment. 
London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all 
overwhelming ; whether or no she was " careful of 
the type," she was as indifferent as Nature herself to 
the single life. In the course of an hour I should 
have to go out to my dinner, which was not supplied 
on the premises, and that effort assumed the form of 
a desperate and dangerous quest. It appeared to me 
that I would rather remain dinnerless, would rather 
even starve, than sally forth into the infernal town, 
where the natural fate of an obscure stranger would 
be to be trampled to death in Piccadilly and his car- 
cass thrown into the Thames. I did not starve, 
however, and I eventually attached myself by a 
hundred human links to the dreadful, delightful 
city. That momentary vision of its smeared face 
and stony heart has remained memorable to me, but 
I am happy to say that I can easily summon up 
others. 

II 

It is, no doubt, not the taste of every one, but for 
the real London-lover the mere immensity of the 
place is a large part of its merit. A small London 
would be an abomination, as it fortunately is an im- 
possibility, for the idea and the name are beyond 
everything an expression of extent and number. 
Practically, of course, one lives in a quarter, in a 
plot ; but in imagination and by a constant mental 
act of reference the sympathizing resident inhabits 
the whole — and it is only of him that I deem it worth 
while to speak. He fancies himself, as they say, for 



8 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

being a particle in so unequalled an aggregation ; 
and its immeasurable circumference, even though un- 
visited and lost in smoke, gives him the sense of a 
social, an intellectual margin. There is a luxury in 
the knowledge that he may come and gO without 
being noticed, even when his comings and goings 
have no nefarious end. I don't mean by this that 
the tongue of London is not a very active member ; 
the tongue of London would indeed be worthy of a 
chapter by itself. But the eyes which at least in 
some measure feed its activity are fortunately for the 
common advantage solicited at any moment by a 
thouasnd different objects. If the place is big, every- 
thing it contains "is certainly not so ; but this may 
at least be said, that if small questions play a part 
there, they play it without illusions about its impor- 
tance. There are too many questions, small or great; 
and each day, as it arrives, leads its children, like a 
kind of mendicant mother, by the hand. Therefore 
perhaps the most general characteristic is the ab- 
sence of insistence. Habits and inclinations flourish 
and fall, but intensity is never one of them. The 
spirit of the great city is not analytic, and, as they 
come up, subjects rarely receive at its hands a treat- 
ment offensively earnest or indiscreetly thorough. 
There are not many — of those of which London dis- 
poses with the assurance begotten of its large ex- 
perience — that wouldn't lend themselves to a ten- 
derer manipulation elsewhere. It takes a very great 
affair, a turn of the Irish screw or a divorce case 
lasting many days, to be fully threshed out. The 



LONDON 9 

mind of Mayfair, when it aspires to show what it 
really can do, lives in the hope of a new divorce case, 
and an indulgent providence — London is positively 
in certain ways the spoiled child of the world — abun- 
dantly recognizes this particular aptitude and hu- 
mors the whim. 

The compensation is that material does arise ; that 
there is great variety, if not morbid subtlety ; and 
that the whohs of the procession of events and topics 
passes across your stage. For the moment I am 
speaking of the inspiration there may be in the sense 
of far frontiers ; the London-lover loses himself in 
this swelling consciousness, delights in the idea that 
the town which encloses him is after all only a paved 
country, a state by itself. This is his condition of 
mind quite as much if he be an adoptive as if he 
be a matter-of-course son. I am by no means sure 
even that he need be of Anglo-Saxon race and have 
inherited the birthright of English speech ; though, 
on the other hand, I make no doubt that these ad- 
vantages minister greatly to closeness of allegiance. 
The great city spreads her dusky mantle over in- 
numerable races and creeds, and I believe there is 
scarcely a known form of worship that has not some 
temple there (have I not attended at the Church of 
Humanity, in Lamb's Conduit, in company with an 
American lady, a vague old gentleman, and several 
seamstresses ?), or any communion of men that has 
not some club or guild. London is indeed an epit- 
ome of the round world, and just as it is a common- 
place to say that there is nothing one can't "get" 



IO ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

there, so it is equally true that there is nothing one 
can't study at first hand. 

One doesn't test these truths every day, but they 
form part of the air one breathes (and welcome, says 
the London-hater — for there is such a benighted ani- 
mal — to the pestilent compound). They color the 
thick, dim distances which in my opinion are the 
most romantic town-vistas in the world ; they min- 
gle with the troubled light to which the straight, un- 
garnished aperture in one's dull, undistinctive house- 
front affords a passage and which makes an interior 
of friendly corners, mysterious tones, and unbetrayed 
ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent me- 
dium of the sky, where the smoke and the fog and 
the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour 
of the day and season of the year, the emanations 
of industries and the reflection of furnaces, the red 
gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset — 
as you never see any source of radiance you can't 
in the least tell — all hang together in a confusion, 
a complication, a shifting but irremovable canopy. 
They form the undertone of the deep, perpetual voice 
of the place. One remembers them when one's loy- 
alty is on the defensive; when it is a question of in- 
troducing as many striking features as possible into 
the list of fine reasons one has sometimes to draw up, 
that eloquent catalogue with which one confronts the 
hostile indictment — the array of other reasons which 
may easily be as long as one's arm. According to 
these other reasons, it plausibly and conclusively 
stands that, as a place to be happy in, London will 



LONDON 1 1 

never do. I don't say it is necessary to meet so ab- 
surd an allegation except for one's personal compla- 
cency. If indifference, in so gorged an organism, is 
still livelier than curiosity, you may avail yourself of 
your own share in it simply to feel that since such 
and such a person doesn't care for real greatness, so 
much the worse for such and such a person- But 
once in a while the best believer recognizes the im- 
pulse to set his religion in order, to sweep the temple 
of his thoughts and trim the sacred lamp. It is at 
such hours as this that he reflects with elation that 
the British capital is the particular spot in the world 
which communicates the greatest sense of life. 

Ill 

The reader will perceive that I do not shrink even 
from the extreme concession of speaking of our capi- 
tal as British, and this in a shameless connection with 
the question of loyalty on the part of an adoptive 
son. For I hasten to explain that if half the source 
of one's interest in it comes from feeling that it is the 
property and even the home of the human race — 
Hawthorne, that best of Americans, says so some- 
where, and places it in this sense side by side with 
Rome — one's appreciation of it is really a large sym- 
pathy, a comprehensive love of humanity. For the 
sake of such a charity as this one may stretch one's 
allegiance ; and the most alien of the cockneyfied, 
though he may bristle with every protest at the inti- 
mation that England has set its stamp upon him, is 
free to admit with conscious pride that he has sub- 



12 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

mitted to Londonization. It is a real stroke of luck 
for a particular country that the capital of the human 
race happens to be British. Surely every other peo- 
ple would have it theirs if they could. Whether the 
English deserve to hold it any longer might be an in- 
teresting field of inquiry ; but as they have not yet 
let it slip, the writer of these lines professes without 
scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste. 
For, after all, if the sense of life is greatest there, it 
is a sense of the life of people of our incompara- 
ble English speech. It is the headquarters of that 
strangely elastic tongue ; and I make this remark 
with a full sense of the terrible way in which the idi- 
om is misused by the populace in general, than whom 
it has been given to few races to impart to conversa- 
tion less of the charm of tone. For a man of letters 
who endeavors to cultivate, however modestly, the 
medium of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hawthorne 
and Emerson, who cherishes the notion of what it 
has achieved and what it may even yet achieve, Lon- 
don must ever have a great illustrative and suggest- 
ive value, and indeed a kind of sanctity. It is the 
single place in which most readers, most possible 
lovers, are gathered together ; it is the most inclusive 
public and the largest social incarnation of the lan- 
guage, of the tradition. Such a personage may well 
let it go for this, and leave the German and the Greek 
to speak for themselves, to express the grounds of 
their predilection, presumably very different. 

When a social product is so vast and various it 
may be approached on a thousand different sides, 



LONDON 13 

and liked and disliked for a thousand different rea- 
sons. The reasons of Piccadilly are not those of 
Camden Town, nor are the curiosities and discour- 
agements of Kilburn the same as those of Westmin- 
ster and Lambeth. The reasons of Piccadilly — I 
mean the friendly ones — are those of which, as a 
general thing, the rooted visitor remains most con- 
scious ; but it must be confessed that even these, for 
the most part, do not lie upon the surface. The ab- 
sence of style, or rather of the intention of style, is 
certainly the most general characteristic of the face 
of London. To cross to Paris under this impression 
is to find one's self surrounded with far other stand- 
ards. There everything reminds you that the idea of 
beautiful and stately arrangement has never been out 
of fashion, that the art of composition has always 
been at work or at play. Avenues and squares, gar- 
dens and quays, have been distributed for effect, and 
to-day the splendid city reaps the accumulation of all 
this ingenuity. The result is not in every quarter 
interesting, and there is a tiresome monotony of the 
" fine " and the symmetrical, above all, of the deathly 
passion for making things " to match." On the other 
hand, the whole air of the place is architectural. On 
the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter 
of accidents — the London-lover has to confess to the 
existence of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgi- 
est commonness. Thousands of acres are covered 
by low black houses of the cheapest construction, 
without ornament, without grace, without character, 
or even identity. In fact, there are many, even in 



14 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the best quarters, in all the region of Mayfair and 
Belgravia, of so paltry and inconvenient, and above 
all of so diminutive a type (those that are let in lodg- 
ings — such poor lodgings as they make — may serve 
as an example), that you wonder what peculiarly lim- 
ited domestic need they were constructed to meet. 
The great misfortune of London, to the eye (it is true 
that this remark applies much less to the City), is the 
want of elevation. There is no architectural impres- 
sion without a certain degree of height, and the Lon- 
don street-vista has none of that sort of pride. 

All the same, if there be not the intention, there is 
at least the accident, of style, which, if one looks at 
it in a friendly way, appears to proceed from three 
sources. One of these is simply the general great- 
ness, and the manner in which that makes a differ- 
ence for the better in any particular spot ; so that, 
though you may often perceive yourself to be in a 
shabby corner, it never occurs to you that this is 
the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its 
magnificent mystifications, which flatters and super- 
fuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, mag- 
nifies distances and minimizes details, confirms the 
inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great 
city makes everything, it makes its own system of 
weather and its own optical laws. The last is the 
congregation of the parks, which constitute an orna- 
ment not elsewhere to be matched, and give the place 
a superiority that none of its uglinesses overcome. 
They spread themselves with such a luxury of space 
in the centre of the town that they form a part of the 



LONDON 15 

impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with 
an audacity altogether their own, make a pastoral 
landscape under the smoky sky. There is no mood 
of the rich London climate that is not becoming to 
them — I have seen them look delightfully romantic, 
like parks in novels, in the wettest winter: — and there 
is scarcely a mood of the appreciative resident to 
which they have not something to say. The high 
things of London, which here and there peep over 
them, only make the spaces vaster by reminding you 
that you are, after all, not in Kent or Yorkshire ; and 
these things, whatever they be — rows of " eligible " 
dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions 
— take such an effective gray-blue tint that a clever 
water-colorist would seem to have put them in for 
pictorial reasons. 

The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has 
an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed 
to me that the Londoner twitted with his low stand- 
ard may point to it with every confidence. In all the 
town-scenery of Europe there can be few things so 
fine ; the only reproach it is open to is that it begs 
the question by seeming— in spite of its being the 
pride of five millions of people — not to belong to a 
town at all. The towers of Notre Dame, as they 
rise, in Paris, from the island that divides the Seine, 
present themselves no more impressively than those 
of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far 
beyond the shining stretch of Hyde Park water. 
Equally admirable is the large, river-like manner in 
which the Serpentine opens away between its wood- 



1 6 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

ed shores. Just after you have crossed the bridge 
(whose very banisters, old and ornamental, of yellow- 
ish-brown stone, I am particularly fond of), you enjoy 
on your left, through the gate of Kensington Gardens 
as you go towards Bayswater, an altogether enchant- 
ing vista — a foot-path over the grass, which loses it- 
self beneath the scattered oaks and elms exactly as if 
the place were a " chase." There could be nothing 
less like London in general than this particular mor- 
sel, and yet it takes London, of all cities, to give you 
such an impression of the country. 

IV 

It takes London to put you in the way of a purely 
rustic walk from Notting Hill to Whitehall. You 
may traverse this immense distance — a most compre- 
hensive diagonal — altogether on soft, fine turf, amid 
the song of birds, the bleat of lambs, the ripple of 
ponds, the rustle of admirable trees. Frequently 
have I wished that, for the sake of such a daily lux- 
ury and of exercise made romantic, I were a govern- 
ment-clerk living, in snug domestic conditions, in a 
Pembridge villa — let me suppose — and having my 
matutinal desk in Westminster. I should turn into 
Kensington Gardens at their northwest limit, and I 
should have, my choice of a hundred pleasant paths 
to the gates of Hyde Park. In Hyde Park I should 
follow the water-side, or the Row, or any other fancy 
of the occasion ; liking best, perhaps, after all, the 
Row in its morning mood, with the mist hanging over 
the dark-red course, and the scattered early riders 



LONDON 17 

taking an identity as the soundless gallop brings them 
nearer. I am free to admit that in the Season, at the 
conventional hours, the Row becomes a weariness 
(save perhaps just for a glimpse, once a year, to re- 
mind one's self how much it is like Du Maurier) ; the 
preoccupied citizen eschews it, and leaves it for the 
most part to the gaping barbarian. I speak of it now 
from the point of view of the pedestrian ; but for the 
rider as well it is at its best when he passes either too 
early or too late. Then, if he be not bent on compar- 
ing it to its disadvantage with the bluer and boskier 
alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, it will not be spoiled 
by the fact that, with its surface that looks like tan, 
its barriers like those of the ring on which the clown 
stands to hold up the hoop to the young lady, its 
empty benches and chairs, its occasional orange-peel, 
its mounted policemen patrolling at intervals like ex- 
pectant supernumeraries, it offers points of real con- 
tact with a circus whose lamps are out. The sky that 
bends over it is frequently not a bad imitation of the 
dingy tent of such an establishment. The ghosts of 
past cavalcades seem to haunt the foggy arena, and 
somehow they are better company than the mashers 
and elongated beauties of current seasons. It is not 
without interest to remember that most of the salient 
figures of English society during the present century 
— and English society means, or rather has hith- 
erto meant, in a large degree, English history — have 
bobbed in the saddle between Apsley House and 
Queen's Gate. You may call the roll if you care to, 
and the air will be thick with dumb voices and dead 
names, like that of some Roman amphitheatre. 
2 



/ 



1 8 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 



It is doubtless a signal proof of being a London- fd 
lover quand mime that one should undertake an apol- * /e 
ogy for so bungled an attempt at a great public place g- 
as Hyde Park Corner. It is certain that the improve- /e 
ments and embellishments recently enacted there have n " 
only served to call further attention to the poverty of i - 
the elements and to the fact that this poverty is ter- e 
ribly illustrative of general conditions. The place is 
the beating heart of the great West End, yet its main 
features are a shabby, stuccoed hospital, the low park- r 
gates in their neat but unimposing frame, the draw- 
ing-room windows of Apsley House and of the com- P 
monplace frontages on the little terrace beside it ; to |t 
which must be added, of course, the only item in the e 
whole prospect that is in the least monumental — the r 
arch spanning the private road beside the gardens of r 
Buckingham Palace. This structure is now bereaved [> 
of the rueful effigy which used to surmount it — the j 1 
Iron Duke in the e;uise of a tin soldier — and has not ls 
been enriched by the transaction as much as mightts 
have been expected.* There is a fine view of Picca-P"" j 
dilly and Knightsbridge, and of the noble mansions, y 
as the house-agents call them, of Grosvenor Place, f 
together with a sense of generous space beyond the [ 
vulgar little railing of the Green Park ; but, except for 
the impression that there would be room for some- 
thing better, there is nothing in all this that speaks to 
the imagination : almost as much as the grimy desert j 

* The monument in the middle of the square, with Sir Edgar j 
Boehm's four fine soldiers, had not been set up when these words 
were written. 



LONDON 19 

of Trafalgar Square the prospect conveys the idea of 
an opportunity wasted. 

All the same, on a fine day in spring it has an ex- 
pressiveness of which I shall not pretend to explain 
the source further than by saying that the flood of life 
and luxury is immeasurably great there. The edifices 
, are mean, but the social stream itself is monumental, 
i and to an observer not positively stolid there is more 
\ excitement and suggestion than I can give a reason 
\ for in the long, distributed waves of traffic, with the 
1 steady policemen marking their rhythm, which roll to- 
gether and apart for so many hours. Then the great, 
'dim city becomes bright and kind, the pall of smoke 
iturns into a veil of haze carelessly worn, the air is 
colored and almost scented by the presence of the 
•biggest society in the world, and most of the things 
ithat mest the eye — or perhaps I should say more of 
them, for the most in London is, no doubt, ever the 
.^■ealm of the dingy — present themselves as "well ap- 
pointed." Everything shines more or less, from the 
window-panes to the dog-collars. So it all looks, with 
its myriad variations and qualifications, to one who 
purveys it over the apron of a hansom, while that ve- 
hicle of vantage, better than any box at the opera, 
^spurts and slackens with the current, 
jj It is not in a hansom, however, that we have figured 
jour punctual young man, whom we must not desert as 
pe fares to the southeast, and who has only to Cross 
Hyde Park Corner to find his way all grassy again, 
jl have a weakness for the convenient, familiar, tree- 
(less, or almost treeless, expanse of the Green Park 



20 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

and the friendly part it plays as a kind of encourage- 5 
ment to Piccadilly. I am so fond of Piccadilly that Ijj 
am grateful to any one or anything that does it a ser-j ', 
vice, and nothing is more worthy of appreciation than 
the southward look it is permitted to enjoy just after 
it passes Devonshire House — a sweep of horizon 
which it would be difficult to match among other 
haunts of men, and thanks to which, of a summer's j 
day, you may spy, beyond the browsed pastures of/ 
the foreground and middle distance, beyond the cold \j 
chimneys of Buckingham Palace and the towers of^ 
Westminster and the swarming river-side and all the/ j 
southern parishes, the hard modern twinkle of thej,' 
roof of the Crystal Palace. 

If the Green Park is familiar, there is still less o 
the exclusive in its pendant, as one may call it — for it 
literally hangs from the other, down the hill — the rem- 
nant of the former garden of the queer, shabby old pal 
ace whose black, inelegant face stares up St. James's 
Street. This popular resort has a great deal of char 
acter, but I am free to confess that much of its char- 
acter comes from its nearness to the Westminste < 
slums. It is a park of intimacy, and perhaps th( , 
most democratic corner of London, in spite of its be- 
ing in the royal and military quarter and close to al: 
kinds of stateliness. There are few hours of the day 
when a thousand smutty children are not sprawling 
over it, and the unemployed lie thick on the grass and l 
cover the benches with a brotherhood of greasy cor- ' 
duroys. If the London parks are the drawing-rooms j 
and clubs of the poor — that is, of those poor (I admit I 



LONDON 21 

it cuts down the number) who live near enough to 
them to reach them — these particular grass-plots 
and alleys may be said to constitute the very salon 
of the slums. 

I know not why, being such a region of greatness 
— great towers, great names, great memories ; at the 
| foot of the Abbey, the Parliament, the fine fragment 
J of Whitehall, with the quarters of the Guards of the 
' sovereign right and left — but the edge of Westminster 
Revokes as many associations of misery as of empire. 
,The neighborhood has been much purified of late, 
but it still contains a collection of specimens — though 
it is far from unique in this — of the low, black ele- 
rnent. The air always seems to me heavy and thick, 
rand here more than elsewhere One hears old England 
"• — the panting, smoke-stained Titan of Matthew Ar- 
nold's fine poem^draw her deep breath with effort, 
t^n fact one is nearer to her heroic lungs, if those organs 
are figured by the great pinnacled and fretted talking- 
jtiouse on the edge of the river. But this same dense 
pnd conscious air plays such everlasting tricks to the 
ieye that the Foreign Office, as you see it from the 
{bridge, often looks romantic, and the sheet of water it 
.overhangs poetic — suggests an Indiah palace bathing 
fits feet in the Ganges. If our pedestrian achieves 
such a comparison as this he has nothing left but to 
[go on to his work — which he will find close at hand. 
jHe will have come the whole way from the far north- 
jwest on the green — which is what was to be demon- 
strated. 



22 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

V 

I feel as if I were taking a tone almost of boastful- 
ness, and no doubt the best way to consider the mat- 
ter is simply to say — without going into the treachery! 
of reasons — that, for one's self, one likes this part or: 
the other. Yet this course would not be unattended 
with danger, inasmuch as at the end of a few such 
professions we might find ourselves committed to a 
tolerance of much that is deplorable. London is so 
clumsy and so brutal, and has gathered together so * 
many of the darkest sides of life, that it is almost ri-j 
diculous to talk of her as a lover talks of his mistress,! 
and almost frivolous to appear to ignore her disfigure-j 
ments and cruelties. She is like a mighty ogress who* 
devours human flesh ; but to me it is a mitigating cir- 
cumstance — though it may not seem so to every one 
— that the ogress herself is human. It is not in wan- 
tonness that she fills her maw, but to keep herselt 
alive and do her tremendous work. She has no timd 
for fine discriminations, but after all she is as good- 
natured as she is huge, and the more you stand up to' 
her, as the phrase is, the better she takes the joke of 
it. It is mainly when you fall on your face before her 
that she gobbles you up. She heeds little what she i 
takes, so long as she has her stint, and the smallest \ 
push to the right or the left will divert her wavering 
bulk from one form of prey to another. It is not to j 
be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in her 
company ; but she is a capital antidote to the morbid, 
and to live with her successfully is an education of the 



LONDON 23 

temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy. 
She gives one a surface for which in a rough world 
one can never be too thankful. She may take away 
reputations, but she forms character. She teaches 
her victims not to "mind," and the great danger for 
them is perhaps that they shall learn the lesson too 
well. 

It is sometimes a wonder to ascertain what they do 
mind, the best -seasoned of her children. Many of 
them assist, without winking, at the most unfathom- 
able dramas, and the common speech of others de- 
notes a familiarity with the horrible. It is her theory 
that she both produces and appreciates the exquisite; 
but if you catch her in flagrant repudiation of both 
responsibilities and confront her with the shortcom- 
ing, she gives you a look, with a shrug of her colossal 
^houlders, which establishes a private relation with 
.you for evermore. She seems to say : " Do you really 
:ake me so seriously as that, you dear, devoted, vol- 
untary dupe, and don't you know what an immeasura- 
ble humbug I am?" You reply that you shall know 
• t henceforth ; but your tone is good-natured, with a 
,iOuch of the cynicism that she herself has taught you ; 
/or you are aware that if she makes herself out better 
"han she is, she also makes herself out much worse. 
,She is immensely democratic, and that, no doubt, is 
part of the manner in which she is salutary to the in- 
dividual , she teaches him his " place " by an incom- 
parable discipline, but deprives him of complaint by 
letting him see that she has exactly the same lash for 
every other back. When he has swallowed the lesson 



24 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

he may enjoy the rude but unfailing justice by which, | 
under her eye, reputations and positions elsewhere 
esteemed great are reduced to the relative. There 
are so many reputations, so many positions, that su- j 
pereminence breaks down, and it is difficult to be so ) 
rare that London can't match you. It is a part of her j 
good-nature and one of her clumsy coquetries to pre- j 
tend sometimes that she hasn't your equivalent, as when j 
she takes it into her head to hunt the lion or form a ] 
ring round a celebrity. But this artifice is so trans- J 
parent that the lion must be very candid or the celeb- . 
rity very obscure to be taken by it. The business is / 
altogether subjective, as the philosophers say, and the / 
great city is primarily looking after herself. Celeb- ! 
rities are convenient — they are one of the things that; 
people can be asked to "meet" — and lion -cutlets, 
put upon the ice, will nourish a family through pe- 
riods of dearth. 

This is what I mean by calling London democratic. 
You may be in it, of course, without being of it ; but 
from the moment you are of it — and on this point 
your own sense will soon enough enlighten you — you 
belong to a body in which a general equality prevails. 
However exalted, however able, however rich, however 
renowned you may be, there are too many people at 
least as much so for your own idiosyncrasies to count. 
I think it is only by being beautiful that you may 
really prevail very much ; for the loveliness of woman 
it has long been noticeable that London will go most 
out of her way. It is when she hunts that particular 
lion that she becomes most dangerous ; then there 



LONDON 25 

are really moments when you would believe, for all 
the world, that she is thinking of what she can give, 
not of what she can get. Lovely ladies, before this, 
have paid for believing it, and will continue to pay in 
days to come. On the whole the people who are least 
deceived are perhaps those who have permitted them- 
selves to believe, in their own interest, that poverty is 
not a disgrace. It is certainly not considered so in 
London, and indeed you can scarcely say where — in 
virtue of diffusion — it would more naturally be ex- 
empt. The possession of money is, of course, im- 
mensely an advantage, but that is a very different 
thing from a disqualification in the lack of it. 

Good-natured in so many things in spite of her cyn- 
ical tongue, and easy-going in spite of her tremendous 
pace, there is nothing in which the large indulgence 
of the town is more shown than in the liberal way she 
looks at obligations of hospitality and the margin she 
allows in these and cognate matters. She wants above 
all to be amused ; she keeps her books loosely, doesn't 
stand on small questions of a chop for a chop, and if 
there be any chance of people's proving a diversion, 
doesn't know or remember or care whether they have 
" called." She forgets even if she herself have called. 
In matters of ceremony she takes and gives a long 
rope, wasting no time in phrases and circumvallations. 
It is no doubt incontestable that one result of her in- 
ability to stand upon trifles and consider details is that 
she has been obliged in some ways to lower rather 
portentously the standard of her manners. She cul- 
tivates the abrupt — for even when she asks you to 



26 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

dine a month ahead the invitation goes off like the 
crack of a pistol — and approaches her ends not ex- 
actly par quatre chemins. She doesn't pretend to 
attach importance to the lesson conveyed in Mat- 
thew Arnold's poem of "The Sick King in Bokhara," 
that, 

"Though we snatch what we desire, 
We may not snatch it eagerly." 

London snatches it more than eagerly if that be the 
only way she can get it. Good manners are a suc- 
cession of details, and I don't mean to say that she 
doesn't attend to them when she has time. She has 
it, however, but seldom — que voulez-vous ? Perhaps the 
matter of note-writing is as good an example as an- 
other of what certain of the elder traditions inevitably 
have become in her hands. She lives by notes — they 
are her very heart-beats ; but those that bear her sig- 
nature are as disjointed as the ravings of delirium, 
and have nothing but a postage-stamp in common 
with the epistolary art. 

VI 

If she doesn't go into particulars it may seem a 
very presumptuous act to have attempted to do so 
on her behalf, and the reader will doubtless think I 
have been punished by having egregiously failed in 
my enumeration. Indeed nothing could well be more 
difficult than to add up the items — the column would 
be altogether too long. One may have dreamed of 
turning the glow — if glow it be — of one's lantern on 



LONDON 27 

each successive facet of the jewel ; but, after all, it 
may be success enough if a confusion of brightness 
be the result. One has not the alternative of speak- 
ing of London as a whole, for the simple reason that 
there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is im- 
measurable — embracing arms never meet. Rather it 
is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them 
is it most important to speak ? Inevitably there must 
be a choice, and I know of none more scientific than 
simply to leave out what we may have to apologize 
for. The uglinesses, the "rookeries," the brutalities, 
the night-aspect of many of the streets, the gin-shops 
and the hour when they are cleared out before closing 
— there are many elements of this kind which have to 
be counted out before a genial summary can be made. 
And yet I should not go so far as to say that it is 
a condition of such geniality to close one's eyes upon 
the immense misery ; on the contrary, I think it is 
partly because we are irremediably conscious of that 
dark gulf that the most general appeal of the great 
city remains exactly what it is, the largest chapter of 
human accidents. I have no idea of what the future 
evolution of the strangely mingled monster may be ; 
whether the poor will improve away the rich, or the 
rich will expropriate the poor, or they will all continue 
to dwell together on their present imperfect terms of 
intercourse. Certain it is, at any rate, that the im- 
pression of suffering is a part of the general vibra- 
tion ; it is one of the things that mingle with all the 
others to make the sound that is supremely dear 
to the consistent London-lover — the rumble of the 






28 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

tremendous human mill. This is the note which, 
in all its modulations, haunts and fascinates and in- 
spires him. And whether or no he may succeed in 
keeping the misery out of the picture, he will freely 
confess that the latter is not spoiled for him by some 
of its duskiest shades. We are far from liking Lon- 
don well enough till we like its defects : the dense 
darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chim- 
ney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the 
brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms 
in Oxford Street or the Strand on December after- 
noons. 

There is still something that recalls to me the en- 
chantments of children — the anticipation of Christ- 
mas, the delight of a holiday walk — in the way the 
shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of 
them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I 
can still waste time in looking at them with dirty 
Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the oth- 
er. There are winter effects, not intrinsically sweet, 
it would appear, which somehow, in absence, touch 
the chords of memory and even the fount of tears ; 
as, for instance, the front of the British Museum on 
a black afternoon, or the portico, when the weather 
is vile, of one of the big square clubs in Pall Mall. 
I can give no adequate account of the subtle poetry 
of such reminiscences ; it depends upon associations 
of which we have often lost the thread. The wide 
colonnade of the Museum, its symmetrical wings, the 
high iron fence in its granite setting, the sense of the 
misty halls within, where all the treasures lie — these 



LONDON 29 

things loom patiently through atmospheric layers 
which instead of making them dreary impart to them 
something of a cheer of red lights in a storm. I 
think the romance of a winter afternoon in London 
arises partly from the fact that, when it is not alto- 
gether smothered, the general lamplight takes this 
hue of hospitality. Such is the color of the interior 
glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, which I positively like 
best when the fog loiters upon their monumental stair- 
cases. 

In saying just now that these retreats may easily 
be, for the exile, part of the phantasmagoria of home- 
sickness, I by no means alluded simply to their solemn 
outsides. If they are still more solemn within, that 
does not make them any less dear in retrospect, at 
least, to a visitor who is bent upon liking his London 
to the end. What is the solemnity but a tribute to 
your nerves, and the stillness but a refined proof of 
intensity of life? To produce such results as these 
the balance of many tastes must be struck, and that 
is only possible in a very high civilization. If I seem 
to intimate that this last abstract term must be the 
cheer of him who has lonely possession of a foggy 
library, without even the excitement of watching for 
some one to put down the magazine he wants, I am 
willing to let the supposition pass, for the apprecia- 
tion of a London club at one of the empty seasons is 
nothing but the strong expression of a preference for 
the great city — by no means so unsociable as it may 
superficially appear — at periods of relative abandon- 
ment. The London year is studded with holidays, 






30 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

blessed little islands of comparative leisure — intervals 
of absence for good society. Then the wonderful 
English faculty for "going out of town for a little 
change " comes into illimitable play, and families 
transport their nurseries and their bath-tubs to those 
rural scenes which form the real substratum of the 
national life. Such moments as these are the para- 
dise of the genuine London-lover, for then he finds 
himself face to face with the object of his passion ; 
he can give himself up to an intercourse which at 
other times is obstructed by his rivals. Then every 
one he knows is out of town, and the exhilarating 
sense of the presence of every one he doesn't know 
becomes by so much the deeper. 

This is why I pronounce his satisfaction not an un- 
sociable, but a positively affectionate emotion. It is 
the mood in which he most measures the immense 
humanity of the place, and in which its limits recede 
furthest into a dimness peopled with possible illustra- 
tions. For his acquaintance, however numerous it 
may be, is finite ; whereas the other, the unvisited 
London, is infinite. It is one of his pleasures to 
think of the experiments and excursions he may make 
in it, even when these adventures don't particularly 
come off. The friendly fog seems to protect and en- 
rich them — to add both to the mystery and security, 
so that it is most in the winter months that the imag- 
ination weaves such delights. They reach their cli- 
max, perhaps, during the strictly social desolation of 
Christmas week, when the country-houses are filled at 
the expense of the metropolis. Then it is that I am 



LONDON 31 

most haunted with the London of Dickens, feel most 
as if it were still recoverable, still exhaling its queer- 
ness in patches perceptible to the appreciative. Then 
the big fires blaze in the lone twilight of the clubs, 
and the new books on the tables say, " Now at last 
you have time to read me," and the afternoon tea 
and toast, and the torpid old gentleman who wakes 
up from a doze to order potash-water, appear to make 
the assurance good. It is not a small matter either, 
to a man of letters, that this is the best time for 
writing, and that during the lamplit days the white 
page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the 
circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate 
folding him in, more vivid and absorbent. Those to 
whom it is forbidden to sit up to work in the small 
hours may, between November and March, enjoy a 
semblance of this luxury in the morning. The weath- 
er makes a kind of sedentary midnight and muffles 
the possible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, 
but excellent for the image. 

VII 
Of course it is too much to say that all the satis- 
faction of life in London comes from literally living 
there, for it is not a paradox that a great deal of it con- 
sists in getting away. It is almost easier to leave it 
than not to, and much of its richness and interest 
proceeds from its ramifications, the fact that all Eng- 
land is in a suburban relation to it. Such an affair 
it is in comparison to get away from Paris or to get 
into it. London melts by wide, ugly zones into the 



32 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

green country, and becomes pretty insidiously, inad- 
vertently — without stopping to change. It is the 
spoiling, perhaps, of the country, but it is the making 
of the insatiable town, and if one is a helpless and 
shameless cockney that is all one is obliged to look 
at. Anything is excusable which enlarges one's civic 
consciousness. It ministers immensely to that of 
the London-lover that, thanks to the tremendous sys- 
tem of coming and going, to the active, hospitable 
habits of the people, to the elaboration of the railway- 
service, the frequency and rapidity of trains, and last, 
though not least, to the fact that much of the loveli- 
est scenery in England lies within a radius of fifty 
miles — thanks to all this he has the rural picturesque 
at his door and may cultivate unlimited vagueness as 
to the line of division between centre and circumfer- 
ence. It is perfectly open to him to consider the re- 
mainder of the United Kingdom, or the British em- 
pire in general, or even, if he be an American, the 
total of the English-speaking territories of the globe, 
as the mere margin, the fitted girdle. 

Is it for this reason — because I like to think how 
great we all are together in the light of heaven and 
the face of the rest of the world, with the bond of 
our glorious tongue, in which we labor to write arti- 
cles and books for each other's candid perusal, how 
great we all are and how great is the great city which 
we may unite fraternally to regard as the capital of 
our race — is it for this that I have a singular kind- 
ness for the London railway-stations, that I like them 
aesthetically, that they interest and fascinate me, and 






LONDON 33 

that I view them with complacency even when I wish 
neither to depart nor to arrive ? They remind me of 
all our reciprocities and activities, our energies and 
curiosities, and our being all distinguished together 
from other people by our great common stamp of per- 
petual motion, our passion for seas and deserts and 
the other side of the globe, the secret of the impres- 
sion of strength — I don't say of social roundness and 
finish — that we produce in any collection of Anglo- 
Saxon types. If in the beloved foggy season I de- 
light in the spectacle of Paddington, Euston, or Wa- 
terloo — I confess I prefer the grave northern stations 
— I am prepared to defend myself against the charge 
of puerility ; for what I seek and what I find in these 
vulgar scenes is at bottom simply so much evidence 
of our larger way of looking at life. The exhibition 
of variety of type is in general one of the bribes by 
which London induces you to condone her abomina- 
tions, and the railway-platform is a kind of compen- 
dium of that variety. I think that nowhere so much 
as in London do people wear — to the eye of observa- 
tion — definite signs of the sort of people they may be. 
If you like above all things to know the sort, you hail 
this fact with joy ; you recognize that if the English 
are immensely distinct from other people, they are 
also socially — and that brings with it, in England, a 
train of moral and intellectual consequences — ex- 
tremely distinct from each other. You may see them 
all together, with the rich coloring of their differences, 
in the fine flare of one of Mr. W. H. Smith's bookstalls 
— a feature not to be* omitted in any enumeration of 
3 



34 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the charms of Paddington and Euston. It is a focus 
of warmth and light in the vast smoky cavern-, it 
gives the idea that literature is a thing of splendor, of 
a dazzling essence, of infinite gas-lit red and gold. A 
glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tan- 
talizing air of clever new things. How brilliant must 
the books all be, how veracious and courteous the 
fresh, pure journals ! Of a Saturday afternoon, as 
you wait in your corner of the compartment for the 
starting of the train, the window makes a frame for 
the glowing picture. I say of a Saturday afternoon, 
because that is the most characteristic time — it speaks 
most of the constant circulation and in particular of 
the quick jump, by express, just before dinner, for 
the Sunday, into the hall of the country-house and the 
forms of closer friendliness, the prolonged talks, the 
familiarizing walks which London excludes. 

There is the emptiness of summer as well, when 
you may have the town to yourself, and I would dis- 
course of it — counting the summer from the first of 
August — were it not that I fear to seem ungracious 
in insisting so much on the negative phases. In 
truth they become positive in another manner, and 
I have an endearing recollection of certain happy ac- 
cidents attached to the only period when London life 
may be said to admit of accident. It is the most lux- 
urious existence in the world, but of that especial 
luxury — the unexpected, the extemporized — it has ir'i 
general too little. In a very tight crowd you can't 
scratch your leg, and in London the social pressure 
is so great that it is difficult to deflect from the pei-"-- 



LONDON 35 

pendicular or to move otherwise than with the mass. 
There is too little of the loose change of time ; every 
half-hour has its preappointed use, written down 
month by month in a little book. As I intimated, 
however, the pages of this volume exhibit from Au- 
gust to November an attractive blankness ; they rep- 
resent the season during which you may taste of that 
highest kind of inspiration, the inspiration of the mo- 
ment. 

This is doubtless what a gentleman had in mind 
who once said to me, in regard to the vast resources 
of London and its having something for every taste, 
" Oh, yes ; when you are bored or want a little 
change you can take the boat down to Blackwall." 
I have never had occasion yet to resort to this par- 
ticular remedy. Perhaps it's a proof that I have 
never been bored. Why Blackwall ? I indeed asked 
myself at the time ; nor have I yet ascertained what 
distractions the mysterious name represents. My 
interlocutor probably used it generically, as a free, 
comprehensive allusion to the charms of the river at 
large. Here the London-lover goes with him all the 
way, and indeed the Thames is altogether such a 
wonderful affair that he feels he has distributed his 
picture very clumsily not to have put it in the very 
forefront. Take it up or take it down, it is equally 
an adjunct of London life, an expression of London 
manners. 

From Westminster to the sea its uses are commer- 
cial, but none the less pictorial for that ; while in the 
other direction — taking it properly a little further up 



36 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

— they are personal, social, athletic, idyllic. In its 
recreative character it is absolutely unique. I know 
of no other classic stream that is so splashed about 
for the mere fun of it. There is something almost 
droll and at the same time almost touching in the 
way that on the smallest pretext of holiday or fine 
weather the mighty population takes to the boats. 
They bump each other in the narrow, charming chan- 
nel ; between Oxford and Richmond they make an 
uninterrupted procession. Nothing is more sugges- 
tive of the personal energy of the people and their 
eagerness to take, in the way of exercise and advent- 
ure, whatever they can get. I hasten to add that 
what they get on the Thames is exquisite, in spite of 
the smallness of the scale and the contrast between 
the numbers and the space. In a word, if the river 
is the busiest suburb of London, it is also by far the 
prettiest. That term applies to it less of course from 
the bridges down, but it is only because in this part 
of its career it deserves a larger praise. To be con- 
sistent, I like it best when it is all dyed and disfigured 
with the town and you look from bridge to bridge — 
they seem wonderfully big and dim — over the brown, 
greasy current, the barges and the penny-steamers, 
the black, sordid, heterogeneous shores. This pros- 
pect, of which so many of the elements are ignoble, 
etches itself to the eye of the lover of " bits " with a 
power that is worthy perhaps of a better cause. 

The way that with her magnificent opportunity 
London has neglected to achieve a river-front is, of 
course, the best possible proof that she has rarely, in 



LONDON 37 

the past, been in the architectural mood which at 
present shows somewhat inexpensive signs of settling 
upon her. Here and there a fine fragment apologizes 
for the failure which it doesn't remedy. Somerset 
House stands up higher perhaps than anything else 
on its granite pedestal, and the palace of Westminster 
reclines — it can hardly be said to stand — on the big 
parliamentary bench of its terrace. The Embank- 
ment, which is admirable if not particularly interesting, 
does what it can, and the mannered houses of Chelsea 
stare across at Battersea Park like eighteenth-century 
ladies surveying a horrid wilderness. On the other 
hand, the Charing Cross railway-station, placed where 
it is, is a national crime ; Milbank prison is a worse 
act of violence than any it was erected to punish, 
and the water-side generally a shameless renunciation 
of effect. We acknowledge, however, that its very 
cynicism is expressive ; so that if one were to choose 
again — short of there being a London Louvre — be- 
tween the usual English irresponsibility in such mat- 
ters and some particular flight of conscience, one 
would perhaps do as well to let the case stand. We 
know what it is, the stretch from Chelsea to Wap- 
ping, but we know not what it might be. It doesn't 
prevent my being always more or less thrilled, of a 
summer afternoon, by the journey on a penny-steam- 
er to Greenwich. 

VIII 

But why do I talk of Greenwich and remind myself 
of one of the unexecuted vignettes with which it had 
been my plan that these desultory and, I fear, some- 



38 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

what incoherent remarks should be studded? They 
will present to the reader no vignettes but those I 
which the artist who has kindly consented to associ- c 
ate himself with my vagaries may be so good as to 
bestow upon them. Why should I speak of Hamp- 
stead, as the question of summer afternoons just \ 
threatened to lead me to do after I should have ex- 
hausted the subject of Greenwich, which I may not 
even touch ? Why should I be so arbitrary when I 
have cheated myself out of the space privately in- 
tended for a series of vivid and ingenious sketches of ' 
the particular physiognomy of the respective quarters ' 
of the town? I had dreamed of doing them all, with, 
their idiosyncrasies and the signs by which you shall 
know them. It is my pleasure to have learned these 
signs — a deeply interesting branch of observation— - 
but I must renounce the display of my lore. 

I haven't the conscience to talk about Hampstead, 
and what a pleasant thing it is to ascend the lonjj 
hill which overhangs, as it were, St. John's Wood and 
begins at the Swiss Cottage — you must mount from 
there, it must be confessed, as you can — and pick up 
a friend at a house of friendship on the top, and 
stroll with him on the rusty Heath, and skirt the gar- 
den-walls of the old square Georgian houses which 
survive from the time when, near as it is to-day to 
London, the place was a kind of provincial centre, 
with Joanna Baillie for its muse, and take the way by 
the Three Spaniards — I would never miss that — and 
look down at the smoky city or across at the Scotch 
firs and the red sunset. It would never do to make 



LONDON 



39 



a tangent in that direction when I have left Kensing- 
ton unsung and Bloomsbury unattempted, and have 
said never a word about the mighty eastward region 
— the queer corners, the dark secrets, the rich sur- 
vivals and mementoes of the City. I particularly re- 
gret having sacrificed Kensington, the once-delight- 
ful, the Thackerayan, with its literary vestiges, its 
quiet, pompous red palace, its square of Queen Anne, 
its house of Lady Castlewood, its Greyhound tavern, 
where Henry Esmond lodged. 

But I can reconcile myself to this when I reflect 
that I have also sacrificed the Season, which doubt- 
less, from an elegant point of view, ought to have 
been the central morceau in the panorama. I have 
noted that the London-lover loves everything in the 
place, but I have not cut myself off from saying that 
his sympathy has degrees, or from remarking that 
the sentiment of the author of these pages has never 
gone all the way with the dense movement of the 
British carnival. That is really the word for the pe- 
riod from Easter to midsummer ; it is a fine, decorous, 
expensive, Protestant carnival, in which the masks are 
not of velvet or silk, but of wonderful deceptive flesh 
and blood, the material of the most beautiful com- 
plexions in the world. Holding that the great inter- 
est of London is the sense the place gives us of mul- 
titudinous life, it is doubtless an inconsequence not 
to care most for the phase of greatest intensity. But 
there is life and life, and the rush and crush of these 
weeks of fashion is after all but a tolerably mechan- 
ical expression of human forces. No one would deny 



40 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

that it is a more universal, brilliant, spectacular on , 
than can be seen anywhere else , and it is not a den -- 
feet that these forces often take the form of wome n 
extremely beautiful. I risk the declaration that th . e 
London season brings together year by year an ui 1- 
equalled collection of handsome persons. I say notl ii- 
ing of the ugly ones; beauty has at the best beeih 
allotted to a small minority, and it is never, at thel: 
most, anywhere, but a question of the number by' 
which that minority is least insignificant. 

There are moments when one can almost forgive i 
the follies of June for the sake of the smile which tire 
sceptical old city puts on for the time, and which, as. I 
noted in an earlier passage of this disquisition, fair. y 
breaks into laughter where she is tickled by the vor- 
tex of Hyde Park Corner. Most perhaps does she 
seem to smile at the end of the summer days, when 
the light lingers and lingers, though the shadovs 
lengthen and the mists redden and the belated riders, 
with dinners to dress for, hurry away from the tram- 
pled arena of the Park. The population at that hour 
surges mainly westward and sees the dust of the day's 
long racket turned into a dull golden haze. There is 
something that has doubtless often, at this particular 
moment, touched the fancy even of the bored and the 
biases in such an emanation of hospitality, of waiting 
dinners, of the festal idea and the whole spectacle of 
the West End preparing herself for an evening six 
parties deep. The scale on which she entertains is 
stupendous, and her invitations and " reminders " are 
as thick as the leaves of the forest. 



LONDON 41 

For half an hour, from eight to nine, every pair of 
wheels presents the portrait of a diner-out. To con- 
sider only the rattling hansoms, the white neckties 
and " dressed " heads which greet you from over the 
apron in a quick, interminable succession, conveys 
the overwhelming impression of a complicated world. 
Who are they all, and where are they all going, and 
whence have they come, and what smoking kitchens 
and gaping portals and marshalled flunkies are pre- 
pared to receive them, from the southernmost limits 
of a loosely-interpreted, an almost transpontine Bel- 
gravia, to the hyperborean confines of St. John's 
Wood ? There are broughams standing at every 
door and carpets laid down for the footfall of the 
issuing if not the entering reveller. The pavements 
are empty now, in the fading light, in the big sallow 
squares and the stuccoed streets of gentility, save for 
the groups of small children holding others that are 
smaller — Ameliar-Ann intrusted with Sarah Jane — 
who collect, wherever the strip of carpet lies, to see 
the fine ladies pass from the carriage or the house. 
The West End is dotted with these pathetic little 
gazing groups ; it is the party of the poor — their Sea- 
son and way of dining out, and a happy illustration of 
" the sympathy that prevails between classes." The 
watchers, I should add, are by no means all children, 
but the lean mature also, and I am sure these wayside 
joys are one of the reasons of an inconvenience much 
deplored — the tendency of the country poor to flock 
to London. Those who dine only occasionally or 
never at all have plenty of time to contemplate those 
with whom the custom has more amplitude. 



42 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

However, it was not my intention to conclude these! 
remarks in a melancholy strain, and Heaven knows( 
that the diners are a prodigious company. It is as, 
moralistic as I shall venture to be if I drop a very soft 
sigh on the paper as T affirm that truth. Are they all 
illuminated spirits and is their conversation the ripest: 
in the world ? This is not to be expected, nor should'. 
I ever suppose it to be desired that an agreeable so-: 
ciety should fail to offer frequent opportunity for in- 
tellectual rest. Such a shortcoming is not one of the 
sins of the London world in general, nor would it be 
just to complain of that world, on any side, on grounds 
of deficiency. It is not what London fails to do that 
strikes the observer, but the general fact that she does 
everything in excess. Excess is her highest reproach, 
and it is her incurable misfortune that there is really 
too much of her. She overwhelms you by quantity 
and number — she ends by making human life, by 
making civilization, appear cheap to you. Wherever 
you go, to parties, exhibitions, concerts, " private 
views," meetings, solitudes, there are already more 
people than enough on the field. How it makes you 
understand the high walls with which so much of Eng- 
lish life is surrounded, and the priceless blessing of a 
park in the country, where there is nothing animated 
but rabbits and pheasants and, for the worst, the im- 
portunate nightingales ! And as the monster grows 
and grows forever, she departs more and more — it 
must be acknowledged — from the ideal of a conven- 
ient society, a society in which intimacy is possible, 
in which the associated meet often and sound and 



LONDON 43 

select and measure and inspire each other, and rela- 
tions and combinations have time to form themselves. 
The substitute for this, in London, is the momentary 
concussion of a million of atoms. It is the difference 
between seeing a great deal of a few and seeing a little 
of every one. " When did you come — are you ' going 
on'?" and it is over; there is no time even for the 
answer. This may seem a perfidious arraignment, 
and I should not make it were I not prepared, or 
rather were I not eager, to add two qualifications. 
One of these is that, cumbrously vast as the place 
may be, I would not have had it smaller by a hair's- 
breadth or have missed one of the fine and fruitful 
impatiences with which it inspires you and which are 
at bottom a heartier tribute, I think, than any great 
city receives. The other is that out of its richness 
and its inexhaustible good-humor it belies the next 
hour any generalization you may have been so simple 
as to make about it. 

1888. 



Je 

fr 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I. 

V 
After a man's long work is over and the sound :: 
his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held \ 
high place find his image strangely simplified and sun a- 
marized. The hand of death, in passing over it, h?as 
smoothed the folds, made it more typical and gener?al. 
The figure retained by the memory is compressied 
and intensified ; accidents have dropped away fron?i it 
and shades have ceased to count ; it stands, sharpbly, 
for a few estimated and cherished things, rather tha^n, 
nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. We cut t ; ne 
silhouette, in a word, out of the confusion of life, we 
save and fix the outline, and it is with his eye on this 
profiled distinction that the critic speaks. It is tiis 
function to speak with assurance when once his im- 
pression has become final ; and it is in noting this 
circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted 
I am to deliver myself on such an occasion as a critic. 
It is not that due conviction is absent*; it is only that 
the function is a cold one. It is not that the final 
impression is dim ; it is only that it is made on a 
softer side of the spirit than the critical sense. The 
process is more mystical, the deposited image is in- 
sistently personal, the generalizing principle is that of 
loyalty. I can therefore not pretend to write of James 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 45 

Russell Lowell in the tone of detachment and classi- 
fication ; I can only offer a few anticipatory touches 
for a portrait that asks for a steadier hand. 

It may be professional prejudice, but as the whole 
color of his life was literary, so it seems to me that we 
may see in his high and happy fortune the most sub- 
stantial honor gathered by the practice of letters from 
a world preoccupied with other things. It was in look- 
ing at him as a man of letters that one drew closest 
to him, and some of his more fanatical friends are not 
to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last 
analysis a tribute to the dominion of style. This is 
the idea that to my sense his name most promptly 
evokes ; and though it was not by any means the only 
idea he cherished, the unity of his career is surely to 
be found in it. He carried style — the style of litera- 
ture — into regions in which we rarely look for it : into 
politics, of all places in the world, into diplomacy, into 
stammering civic dinners and ponderous anniversa- 
ries, into letters and notes and telegrams, into every 
turn of the hour — absolutely into conversation, where 
indeed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial 
wit. Any friendly estimate of him is foredoomed to 
savor potently of reminiscence, so that I may mention 
how vividly I recall the occasion on which he first 
struck me as completely representative. 

The association could only grow, but the essence 
of it was all there on the eve of his going as minister 
to Spain. It was late in the summer of 1877 ; he 
spent a few days in London on his way to Madrid, 
in the hushed gray August, and I remember dining 



46 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

with him at a dim little hotel in Park Street, whiclj 
I had never entered before and have never enteref" 
since, but which, whenever I pass it, seems to looj 
at me with the melancholy of those inanimate thing e 
that have participated. That particular evening rV" 
mained, in my fancy, a kind of bridge between hr" 
old bookish and his new worldly life ; which, howeve 1 £ 
had much more in common than they had in distintf*"' y 
tion. He turned the pages of the later experience 
with very much the same contemplative reader's sens'.e 
with which in his library he had for years smoked 
the student's pipe over a thousand volumes : the only 
difference was that a good many of the leaves were 
still to cut. At any rate, he was enviably gay and 
amused, and this preliminary hour struck me literally 
as the reward of consistency. It was tinted with the 
promise of a singularly interesting future, but the 
saturated American time was all behind it, and what 
was to come seemed an ideal opportunity for the 
nourished mind. That the American years had been 
diluted with several visits to Europe was not a flaw 
in the harmony, for to recollect certain other foreign 
occasions — pleasant Parisian and delightful Italian 
strolls — was to remember that, if these had been 
months of absence for him, they were for me, on the 
wings of his talk, hours of repatriation. This talk 
was humorously and racily fond, charged with a 
perfect drollery of reference to the oilier country 
(there were always two — the one we were in and the 
one we weren't), the details of my too sketchy con- y I 
ception of which, admitted for argument, he showed 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 47 

lendless good-nature in filling in. It was a joke, 
fi polished by much use, that I was dreadfully at sea 
f' about my native land ; and it would have been pleas- 
ant indeed to know even less than I did, so that I 
might have learned the whole story from Mr. Lowell's 
lips. 

His America was a country worth hearing about, 
a magnificent conception, an admirably consistent 
and lovable object of allegiance. If the sign that 
in Europe one knew him best by was his intense 
national consciousness, one felt that this conscious- 
ness could not sit lightly on a man in whom it was 
the strongest form of piety. Fortunately for him 
and for his friends he was one of the most whimsical, 
one of the wittiest of human beings, so that he could 
play with his patriotism and make it various. All 
the same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion 
that hums through much of his finest verse — almost 
the only passion that, to my sense, his poetry con- 
tains — the accent of chivalry, of the lover, the knight 
ready to do battle for his mistress. Above all, it was 
a particular allegiance to New England — a quarter of 
the earth in respect to which the hand of long habit, 
of that affection which is usually half convenience, 
never let go the prime idea, the standard. New 
England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses 
the whole history of her origines ; it was impossible 
to know him without a sense that he had a rare 
divination of the hard realities of her past. " The 
Biglow Papers " show to what a tune he could play 
with his patriotism — all literature contains, I think, 



48 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

no finer sport ; but he is serious enough when he J_ 
speaks of the L 

..." strange New World, that yit wast never young, <e 
"Whose youth, from thee, by gripin' need was wrung ; \. 

Brown foundlin' of the woods whose baby-bed j 

Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread, 
And who grew'st strong thro' shifts and wants and pains, 
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains." 

He was never at trouble to conceal his respect for 
such an origin as that, and when he came to Europe 
in 1877 this sentiment was, in his luggage, one of the 
articles on which he could most easily put his hand. 

One of the others was the extraordinary youthful- 
ness which could make a man considerably younger 
than himself (so that it was only with the lapse of 
years that the relation of age settled upon the right 
note) constantly forget that he had copious ante- 
cedents. In the times when the difference counted 
for more — old Cambridge days that seem far away 
now — I doubtless thought him more professorial than 
he felt, but I am sure that in the sequel I never 
thought him younger. The boy in him was never 
more clamorous than during the last summer that he 
spent in England, two years before his death. Since 
the recollection comes of itself I may mention as my 
earliest impression of him the charm that certain of 
his Harvard lectures — on English literature, on Old 
French — had for a very immature person who was 
supposed to be pursuing, in one of the schools, a 
very different branch of knowledge, but who on dusky 
winter afternoons escaped with irresponsible zeal 



is 
r. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 49 

I into the glow of Mr. Lowell's learned lamplight, the 
fi- particular incidence of which, in the small, still lect- 
f)< ure-room, and the illumination of his head and 
\ hands, I recall with extreme vividness. He talked 
j communicatively of style, and where else in all the 
] place was any such talk to be heard ? It made a 
romance of the hour — it made even a picture of 
: the scene ; it was an unforgetable initiation. If he 
was American enough in Europe, in America he was 
abundantly European. He was so steeped in history 
and literature that to some yearning young persons 
he made the taste of knowledge almost sweeter than 
it was ever to be again. He was redolent, intellect- 
ually speaking, of Italy and Spain ; he had lived in 
long intimacy with Dante and Cervantes and Cal- 
deron ; he embodied to envious aspirants the happy 
intellectual fortune — independent years in a full 
library, years of acquisition without haste and with- 
out rest, a robust love of study which went sociably 
arm in arm with a robust love of life. This love of 
life was so strong in him that he could lose himself 
in little diversions as well as in big books. He was 
fond of everything human and natural, everything 
that had color and character, and no gayety, no 
sense of comedy, was ever more easily kindled by 
contact. When he was not surrounded by great 
pleasures he could find his account in small ones, 
and no situation could be dull for a man in whom 
all reflection, all reaction, was witty. 

I waited some years really to know him, but it was 
to find at once that he was delightful to walk with. 
4 



50 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

He spent the winter of 1872-73 in Paris, and if I had 
not already been fond of the streets of that city his | 
example and companionship would have made me' 
so. We both had the habit of long walks, and he 
knew his Paris as he knew all his subjects. The his- 
tory of a thing was always what he first saw in it — 
he recognized the object as a link in an interminable 
chain. He led at this season the most home-keep- 
ing, book-buying life, and Old French texts made his 
evenings dear to him. He had dropped (and where 
he dropped he usually stayed) into an intensely local 
and extremely savory little hotel in the Faubourg 
Saint-Germain, unknown to tourists, but patronized 
by deputies, where the table d'hote, at which the host 
sat down with the guests and contradiction flour- 
ished, was a page of Balzac, full of illustration for 
the humorist. I used sometimes of a Sunday even- 
ing to dine there, and to this day, on rainy winter 
nights, I never cross the Seine amid the wet flare of 
the myriad lamps, never note the varnished rush of 
the river or the way the Louvre grows superb in the 
darkness, without a recurrent consciousness of the old 
sociable errand, the sense of dipping into a still denser 
Paris, with the Tetnps and M. Sarcey in my pocket. 

We both spent the following winter — he at least 
the larger part of it — in Florence, out of manifold 
memories of which certain hours in his company, 
certain charmed Italian afternoons in Boboli gar- 
dens, on San Miniato terraces, come back to me with 
a glow of their own. He had indeed memories of 
earlier Italian times, some of which he has admirably 






JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 5 1 



recorded — anecdotes, tormenting to a late-comer, of 
the superseded, the missed. He himself, in his per- 
petual freshness, seemed to come so late that it was 
always a surprise to me that he had started so early. 
Almost any Italy, however, was good enough for him, 
and he kept criticism for great occasions, for the 
wise relapse, the study-chair, and the vanquished 
hesitation (not timid, but overbrimming, like a vessel 
dangerous to move) of that large prose pen which 
was so firm when once set in motion. He liked 
the Italian people — he liked the people everywhere, 
and the warm street life and the exquisite idiom ; 
the Tuscan tongue, indeed, so early ripe and yet still 
so perfectly alive, was one of the comforts of the 
world to him. He produced that winter a poem so 
ample and noble that it was worthy to come into 
being in classic air — the magnificent elegy on the 
death of Agassiz, which strikes me as a summary 
of all his vigors and felicities, his most genial 
achievement, and (after the Harvard " Commemora- 
tion Ode ") the truest expression of his poetic nat- 
ure. It is hard to lend to a great old house, in 
Italy, even when it has become a modern inn, any 
associations as romantic as those it already wears ; 
but what the high-windowed face of the Floren- 
tine Hotel du Nord speaks to me of to-day, over 
its chattering cab-stand and across the statued pillar 
of the little square of the Holy Trinity, is neither its 
ancient honor nor its actual fall, but the sound, one 
December evening, by the fire the poet pronounces 
" starved," of 



52 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

<k I cannot think he wished so soon to die 
With all his senses full of eager heat, 

And rosy years that stood expectant by 

To buckle the winged sandals on their feet, 

He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet 

Took with both hands unsparingly." 

Of Mr. Lowell's residence in Spain I know noth- 
ing but what I gathered from his talk after he took 
possession, late in the spring of 1879, of the post 
in London rendered vacant by the retirement of Mr. 
John Welsh ; much of it inevitably referring to the 
domestic sorrow — the prolonged illness of his ad- 
mirable wife — which cast over these years a cloud 
that darkened further during the early part of his 
English period. I remember getting from him a 
sense that a diplomatic situation at Madrid was not 
quite so refreshing a thing as might have been ex- 
pected, and that for the American representative at 
least there was not enough business to give a savor 
to duty. This particular representative's solution 
of every personal problem, however, was a page of 
philology in a cloud of tobacco, and as he had seen 
the picture before through his studies, so now he 
doubtless saw his studies through the picture. The 
palace was a part of it, where the ghost of Charles 
V. still walked and the princesses were what is called 
in princesses literary. The diplomatic circle was 
animated — if that be the word — by whist ; what his 
own share of the game was enlivened by may be 
left to the imagination of those who remember the 
irrepressibility, on his lips, of the comic idea. It 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 53 

might have been taken for granted that he was well 
content to be transferred to England ; but I have 
no definite recollection of the degree of his satis- 
faction beforehand. I think he was mainly con- 
scious of the weight of the new responsibility, so 
that the unalloyed pleasure was that of his friends 
and of the most enlightened part of the public in 
the two countries, to which the appointment ap- 
peared to have an unusual felicity. It was made, 
as it were, for quality, and that continued to be the 
sign of the function so long as Mr. Lowell exercised 
it. The difficulty — if I may speak of difficulty — 
was that all judgment of it was necessarily a priori. 
It was impossible for him to know what a success, 
in vulgar parlance, he might make of a totally un- 
tried character, and, above all, to foresee how this 
character would adapt itself to his own disposition. 
During the years of his residence in London on an 
official footing it constantly struck me that it was 
the office that inclined at every turn to him, rather 
than he who inclined to the office. 

I may appear to speak too much of this phase "of 
his life as the most memorable part of it — especially 
considering how short a time it occupied in regard 
to the whole ; but in addition to its being the only 
long phase of which I can speak at all closely from 
personal observation, it is just to remember that these 
were the years in which all the other years were made 
most evident. " We knew him and valued him ages 
before, and never stinted our appreciation, never 
waited to care for him till he had become the fash- 



54 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

ion," his American readers and listeners, his pupils 
and colleagues, might say ; to which the answer is 
that those who admired him most were just those 
who might naturally rejoice in the multiplication of 
his opportunities. He came to London with only a 
vague notion, evidently, of what these opportunities 
were to be, and in fact there was no defining them in 
advance : what they proved to be, on the spot, was 
anything and everything that he might make them. 
I remember hearing him say a day or two after his 
arrival, " Oh, I've lost all my wit — you mustn't look 
to me for good things now." The words were uttered 
to a gentleman who had found one of his " things " 
very good, and who, having a political speech to make 
in a day or two, had thriftily asked his leave to bring 
it in. There could have been no better example of 
the experimental nature of his acceptance of the 
post ; for the very foundation of the distinction that 
he gave it was his great reserve of wit. He had no 
idea how much he had left till he tried it, and he had 
never before had so much occasion to try it. This 
uncertainty might pervade the minds even of such of 
his friends as had a near view of his start ; but those 
friends would have had singularly little imagination 
if they had failed to be struck in a general way with 
the highly civilized character of his mission. There 
are circumstances in operation (too numerous to re- 
cite) which combine to undermine greatly the com- 
fort of the representative of the United States in a 
foreign country ; it is, to speak summarily, in many 
respects a singularly embarrassing honor. I cannot 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 55 

express more strongly how happy Mr. Lowell's oppor- 
tunity seemed to be than by saying that he struck 
people at the moment as enviable. It was an inten- 
sification of the impression given by the glimpse of 
him on his way to Spain. The true reward of an Eng- 
lish style was to be sent to England, and if his career 
in that country was throughout amusing, in the high- 
est sense of the term, this result was, for others at 
least, a part of their gratified suspense as to the fur- 
ther possibilities of the style. 

From the friendly and intimate point of view it was 
presumable from the first that there would be a kind 
of drama, a spectacle ; and if one had already lived 
a few years in London one could have an interesting 
prevision of some of its features. London is a great 
personage, and with those with whom she establishes 
a relation she always plays, as it were, her game. 
This game, throughout Mr. Lowell's residence, but 
especially during the early part, was exciting ; so 
much so that I remember being positively sorry, as 
if I were leaving the theatre before the fall of the 
curtain, when, at that time, more than once I found 
myself, by visits to the Continent, obliged to turn my 
back upon it. The sight of his variety was a help to 
know London better ; and it was a question whether 
he could ever know her so well as those who could 
freely consider the pair together. He offered her 
from the first a nut to crack, a morsel to roll under 
her tongue. She is the great consumer of spices and 
sweets ; if I were not afraid of forcing the image I 
should say that she is too unwieldy to feed herself, 



56 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

and requires, in recurring seasons, as she sits pro- 
digiously at her banquet, to be approached with the 
consecrated ladle. She placed this implement in Mr. 
Lowell's hands with a confidence so immediate as to 
be truly touching — a confidence that speaks for the 
eventual amalgamation of the Anglo-Saxon race in 
a way that surely no casual friction can obliterate. 
She can confer conspicuity, at least for the hour, so 
well that she is constantly under the temptation to 
do so ; she holds a court for those who speak to her, 
and she is perpetually trying voices. She recognized 
Mr. Lowell's from the first, and appointed him really 
her speaker-in-chief. She has a peculiar need, which 
when you know her well you understand, of being 
eased off with herself, and the American minister 
speedily appeared just the man to ease her. He 
played into her talk and her speeches, her commemo- 
rations and functions, her dinners and discussions, 
her editorials and anecdotes. She has immense 
wheels which are always going round, and the pon- 
derous precision of which can be observed only on 
the spot. They naturally demand something to grind, 
and the machine holds out great iron hands and 
draws in reputations and talents, or sometimes only 
names and phrases. 

Mr. Lowell immediately found himself in England, 
whether to his surprise or no I am unable to say, the 
first of after-dinner speakers. It was perhaps some- 
what to the surprise of his public there, for it was 
not to have been calculated in advance that he would 
have become so expert in his own country — a coun- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 57 

try sparing of feast-days and ceremonies. His prac- 
tice had been great before he came to London, but 
his performance there would have been a strain upon 
any practice. It was a point of honor with him 
never to refuse a challenge, and this attitude, under 
the circumstances, was heroic, for he became a con- 
venience that really tended to multiply occasions. 
It was exactly his high competence in these direc- 
tions that constituted the practical good effect of his 
mission, the particular manner in which it made for 
civilization. It was the revanche of letters ; that 
throughout was the particular note of the part he 
played. There would have been no revanche if he 
had played it inadequately ; therefore it was a pleas- 
ure to feel that he was accomplished up to the hilt. 
Those who didn't like him pronounced him too ac- 
complished, too omniscient; but, save in a sense that 
I will specify, I never saw him commit himself unad- 
visedly, and much is to be forgiven a love of precise 
knowledge which keeps a man out of mistakes. He 
had a horror of them ; no one was ever more in love 
with the idea of being right and of keeping others 
from being wrong. The famous Puritan conscience, 
which was a persistent part of his heredity, operated 
in him perhaps most strongly on the scholarly side. 
He enjoyed the detail of research and the discussion 
of differences, and he had an instinct for rectification 
which was unflinching. All this formed a part of the 
enviability I have noted — the serenity of that larger 
reputation which came to him late in life, which had 
been paid for in advance, and in regard to which his 



58 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

finished discharge of his diplomatic duties acted, if 
not certainly as a cause, at least as a stimulus. The 
reputation was not doubtless the happiest thing ; the 
happiest thing was the inward opportunity, the chance 
to absorb into an intelligence extraordinarily prepared 
a peculiarly full revelation. 

He had studied English history for forty years in 
the texts, and at last he could study it in the pieces 
themselves, could handle and verify the relics. For 
the man who in such a position recognizes his advan- 
tages England makes herself a museum of illustration. 
She is at home in the comfortable dust of her ages, 
where there is no need of excavation, as she has 
never been buried, and the explorer finds the ways as 
open to him as the corridors of an exhibition. It was 
an exhibition of which Mr. Lowell never grew tired, 
for it was infinitely various and living ; it brought 
him back repeatedly after his public mission had ex- 
pired, and it was perpetually suggestive to him while 
that mission lasted. If he played his part so well 
here — I allude now more particularly to the social 
and expressive side of it — it was because he was so 
open to suggestion. Old England spoke to him so 
much as a man of letters that it was inevitable he 
should answer her back. On the firmness and tact 
with which he acquitted himself of his strictly diplo- 
matic work I shall not presume to touch ; his success 
was promptly appreciated in quarters where the offi- 
cial record may be found, as well as in others less 
discoverable to-day, columns congruous with their 
vituperative " headings," where it must be looked for 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 59 

between the lines. These latter responsibilities, be- 
gotten mainly of the great Irish complication, were 
heavy ones, but they were presumably the keenest 
interest of his term, and I include them essentially 
in the picture afforded by that term of the supremely 
symmetrical literary life — the life in which the con- 
trasts have been effectively timed ; in which the in- 
vading and acclaiming world has entered too late to 
interfere, to distract, but still in time to fertilize ; in 
which contacts have multiplied and horizons widened 
gradually ; in which, in short, the dessert has come 
after the dinner, the answer after the question, and 
the proof after the patience. 

I may seem to exaggerate in Mr. Lowell's history 
the importance of the last dozen years of his life — 
especially if the reckoning be made of the amount of 
characteristic production that preceded them. He 
was the same admirable writer that he appears to-day 
before he touched diplomacy — he had already given 
to the world the volumes on which his reputation 
rests. I cannot attempt in this place and at this hour 
a critical estimate of his writings ; the perspective is 
too short and our acquaintance too recent. Yet I 
have been reading him over in fragments, not to 
judge, but to recall him, and it is as impossible to 
speak of him without the sense of his high place as 
it would be with the pretension to be final about it. 
He looms, in such a renewed impression, very large 
and ripe and sane, and if he was an admirable man 
of letters there should be no want of emphasis on the 
first term of the title. He was indeed in literature a 



60 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

man essentially masculine, upright, downright. Pre- 
senting to us survivors that simplified face that I 
have spoken of, he almost already looks at us as the 
last accomplished representative of the joy of life. 
His robust and humorous optimism rounds itself 
more and more; he has even now something of the 
air of a classic, and if he really becomes one it will 
be in virtue of his having placed as fine an irony at 
the service of hope as certain masters of the other 
strain have placed at that of despair. Sturdy liberal 
as he was and contemptuous of all timidities of ad- 
vance and reservations of faith, one thinks of him 
to-day, at the point at which we leave him, as the last 
of the literary conservatives. He took his stand on 
the ancient cheerful wisdom, many of the ingenious 
modern emendations of which seemed to him simply 
droll. 

Few things were really so droll as he could make 
them, and not a great many perhaps are so absolute. 
The solution of the problem of life lay for him in ac- 
tion, in conduct, in decency; his imagination lighted 
up to him but scantily the region of analysis and 
apology. Like all interesting literary figures he is 
full of tacit as well as of uttered reference to the con- 
ditions that engendered him ; he really testifies as 
much as Hawthorne to the New England spirit, though 
in a totally different tone. The two writers, as wit- 
nesses, weigh against each other, and the picture 
would be imperfect if both had not had a hand in it. 
If Hawthorne expressed the mysticism and the gloom 
of the transplanted Puritan, his passive and haunted 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 6 1 

side, Lowell saw him in the familiar daylight of prac- 
tice and prosperity and good health. The author of 
" The Biglow Papers " was surely the healthiest of 
highly cultivated geniuses, just as he was the least 
flippant of jesters and the least hysterical of poets. 
If Hawthorne fairly cherished the idea of evil in man, 
Lowell's vision of " sin " was operative mainly for a 
single purpose — that of putting in motion the civic 
lash. " The Biglow Papers " are mainly an exposure 
of national injustice and political dishonesty ; his 
satiric ardor was simply the other side of the medal 
of his patriotism. His poetry is not all satirical, but 
the highest and most sustained flights of it are patri- 
otic, and in reading it over I am struck with the vivid 
virtue of this part of it — something strenuous and 
antique, the watchful citizen smiting the solemn lyre. 
The look at life that it embodies is never merely 
curious, never irresponsible ; it is only the author's 
humor that is whimsical, never his emotion nor his 
passion. His poetical performance might sometimes, 
no doubt, be more intensely lyrical, but it is hard to 
see how it could be more intensely moral — I mean, of 
course, in the widest sense of the term. His play is 
as good as a game in the open air ; but when he is 
serious he is as serious as Wordsworth, and much 
more compact. He is the poet of pluck and purpose 
and action, of the gayety and liberty of virtue. He 
commemorates all manly pieties and affections, but 
rarely conceals his mistrust of overbrimming sensibil- 
ity. If the ancients and the Elizabethans, he some- 
where says, "had not discovered the picturesque, as 



62 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

we understand it, they found surprisingly fine scenery 
in man and his destiny, and would have seen some- 
thing ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle 
of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron 
of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his 
finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence." It 
is visible that the poetic occasion that was most after 
his own heart was the storm and stress of the Civil 
War. He vibrated in this long tension more deeply 
than in any other experience. It was the time that 
kindled his steadiest fire, prompted his noblest verse, 
and gave him what he relished most, a ground for 
high assurance, a sense of being sturdily in the 
right and having something to stand up for. He 
never feared and never shirked the obligation to be 
positive. Firm and liberal critic as he was, and with 
nothing of party spirit in his utterance save in the 
sense that his sincerity was his party, his mind had 
little affinity with superfine estimates and shades and 
tints of opinion : when he felt at all he felt altogeth- 
er — was always on the same side as his likings and 
loyalties. He had no experimental sympathies, and 
no part of him was traitor to the rest. 

This temper drove the principle of subtlety in his 
intelligence, which is a need for the last refinement, 
to take refuge in one particular, and I must add very 
spacious, corner, where indeed it was capable of the 
widest expansion. The thing he loved most in the 
world after his country was the English tongue, of 
which he was an infallible master, and his devotion to 
which was, in fact, a sort of agent in his patriotism. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 63 

The two passions, at any rate, were closely connected, 
and I will not pretend to have determined whether the 
Western republic was dear to him because he held that 
it was a magnificent field for the language, or whether 
the language was dear to him because it had felt the 
impact of Massachusetts. He himself was not unhap- 
pily responsible for a large part of the latter occur- 
rence. His linguistic sense is perhaps the thing his 
reputation may best be trusted to rest upon — I mean, 
of course, in its large outcome of style. There is a 
high strain of originality in it. for it is difficult to re- 
call a writer of our day in whom the handling of words 
has been at once such an art and such a science. Mr. 
Lowell's generous temperament seems here to triumph 
in one quarter, while his educated patience triumphs 
in the other. When a man loves words singly he is 
apt not to care for them in an order, just as a very 
great painter may be quite indifferent to the chemical 
composition of his colors. But Mr. Lowell was both 
chemist and artist ; the only wonder was that with so 
many theories about language he should have had so 
much lucidity left for practice. He used it both as an 
antiquarian and as a lover of life, and was a capital 
instance of the possible harmony between imagination 
and knowledge — a living proof that the letter does 
not necessarily kill. 

His work represents this reconciled opposition, ref- 
erable as it is half to the critic and half to the poet. 
If either half suffers just a little it is perhaps in places 
his poetry, a part of which is I scarcely know what to 
say but too literary, more the result of an interest in 



64 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the general form than of the stirred emotion. One 
feels at moments that he speaks in verse mainly be- 
cause he is penetrated with what verse has achieved. 
But these moments are occasional, and when the 
stirred emotion does give a hand to the interest in the 
general form the product is always of the highest 
order. His poems written during the war all glow 
with a splendid fusion — one can think of nothing at 
once more personal and, in the highest sense of the 
word, more professional. To me, at any rate, there is 
something fascinating in the way in which, in the 
Harvard " Commemoration Ode," for instance, the air 
of the study mingles with the hot breath of passion. 
The reader who is eternally bribed by form may ask 
himself whether Mr. Lowell's prose or his poetry has 
the better chance of a long life — the hesitation being 
justified by the rare degree in which the prose has 
the great qualities of style ; but in the presence of 
some of the splendid stanzas inspired by the war-time 
(and among them I include, of course, the second 
series of "The Biglow Papers ") one feels that, what- 
ever shall become of the essays, the transmission 
from generation to generation of such things as these 
may safely be left to the national conscience. They 
translate with equal exaltation and veracity the high- 
est national mood, and it is in them that all younger 
Americans, those now and lately reaching manhood, 
may best feel the great historic throb, the throb un- 
known to plodding peace. No poet surely has ever 
placed the concrete idea of his country in a more ro- 
mantic light than Mr. Lowell ; none certainly, speak- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 65 

ing as an American to Americans, has found on its 
behalf accents more eloquently tender, more beguil- 
ing to the imagination. 

' ' Dear land whom triflers now make bold to scorn 
(Thee from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn). 

' ' Oh Beautiful ! my Country ! ours once more ! 
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, 
And letting thy set lips, 
Freed from wrath's pale eclipse, 
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare !" 

Great poetry is made only by a great meaning, and 
the national bias, I know, never made anything better 
that was hot good in itself ; but each time I read over 
the Harvard " Commemoration Ode " the more full 
and strong, the more august and pathetic, does it ap- 
pear. This is only a proof that if the national senti- 
ment preserves it the national sentiment will show 
excellent taste — which she has been known in some 
cases not to do. 

If I were not afraid of falling into the tone of liter- 
ary criticism I should speak of several of the impres- 
sions — that is, of the charmed absorption — accompa- 
nying an attentive reperusal of the four or five volumes 
of Mr. Lowell's poetry. The word I have already 
used comes back to me : it is all so masculine, so fine 
without being thin, so steadied by the temperament 
of the author. It is intensely literary and yet intense- 
ly warm, warm with the contact of friendly and do- 
mestic things, loved local sights and sounds, the color 
and odor of New England, and (here particularly 

5 



66 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

warm without fever) with the sanest, lucidest intellect- 
ual life. There is something of seasonable nature in 
every verse — the freshness of the spirit sociable with 
earth and sky and stream. In the best things there 
is the incalculable magic note — all the more effective 
from the general ground-tone of reason. What could 
be more strangely sweet than the little poem of 
" Phcebe," in " Heartsease and Rue " — a reminiscence 
of the saddest of small bird-notes caught in the dim- 
mest of wakeful dawns ? What could be more largely 
vivid, more in the grand style of friendship and por- 
traiture, than the masterly composition on the death 
of Agassiz, in which the very tenderness of regret 
flushes faintly with humor, and ingenuity broadens at 
every turn into eloquence ? Such a poem as this — im- 
mensely fortunate in reflecting an extraordinary per- 
sonality — takes its place with the few great elegies 
in our language, gives a hand to " Lycidas " and 
to " Thyrsis." 

I may not go into detail, or I should speak of twen- 
ty other things, especially of the mellow, witty wisdom 
of "The Cathedral" and of the infinite, intricate del- 
icacy of " Endymion " — more tremulous, more pene- 
trating than any other of the author's poetic produc- 
tions, I think, and exceptionally fine in surface. As 
for " The Biglow Papers," they seem to me, in re- 
gard to their author, not so much produced as pro- 
ductive — productive of a clear, delightful image of the 
temper and nature of the man. One says of them not 
that they are by him, but that they are his very self, 
so full of his opinions and perceptions, his humor and 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 67 

his wit, his character, his experience, his talk, and his 
intense consciousness of race. They testify to many 
things, but most of all to the thing I have last named ; 
and it may seem to those whose observation of the 
author was most complete during the concluding 
years of his life that they could testify to nothing 
more characteristic. If he was inveterately, in Eng- 
land and on the Continent, the American abroad 
(though jealous, indeed, of the liberty to be at home 
even there), so the lucubrations of Parson Wilbur and 
his contributors are an unsurpassably deliberate ex- 
hibition of the primitive home-quality. I may seem 
to be going far when I say that they constitute to my 
sense the author's most literary production ; they ex- 
emplify, at any rate, his inexhaustible interest in the 
question of style and his extraordinary acuteness in 
dealing with it. They are a wonderful study of style 
— by which I mean of organized expression — and 
nothing could be more significant than the fact that 
he should have put his finest faculty for linguistics at 
the service of the Yankee character. 

He knew more, I think, about the rustic American 
speech than all others together who have known any- 
thing of it, so much more closely, justly, and sympa- 
thetically had he noted it. He honored it 'with the 
strongest scientific interest, and indeed he may well 
have been on terms of reciprocity with a dialect that 
had enabled him to produce a masterpiece. The 
only drawback I can imagine to a just complacency in 
this transaction would have been the sense that the 
people are few, after all, who can measure the minute 



68 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

perfection of the success — a success not only of swift 
insight, but of patient observation. Mr. Lowell was 
as capable of patience in illustrating New England 
idiosyncrasies as he was capable of impatience. He 
never forgot, at. any rate, that he stood there for all 
such things — stood for them particularly during the 
years he spent in England ; and his attitude was made 
up of many curious and complicated and admirable 
elements. He was so proud — not for himself, but 
for his country — that he felt the need of a kind of 
official version of everything at home that in other 
quarters might be judged anomalous. Theoretically 
he cared little for the judgment of other quarters, 
and he was always amused — the good-natured Brit- 
ish lion in person could not have been more so — at 
" well-meaning " compliment or commendation ; it re- 
quired, it must be admitted, more tact than is usually 
current to incur the visitation of neither the sharper 
nor the sunnier form of his irony. But, in fact, the 
national consciousness was too acute in him for slum- 
ber at his post, and he paid in a certain restlessness 
the penalty of his imagination, of the fatal sense of 
perspective and the terrible faculty of comparison. 
It would have been intolerable to him, moreover, to 
be an empirical American, and he had organized his 
loyalty with a thoroughness of which his admirable 
wit was an efficient messenger. He never antici- 
pated attack, though it would be a meagre account 
of his attitude to say it was defensive ; but he took 
appreciation for granted, and eased the way for it 
with reasons that were cleverer in nothing than in 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 69 

appearing casual. These reasons were innumerable, 
but they were all the reasons of a lover. It was not 
simply that he loved his country — he was literally in 
love with it. 

If there be two kinds of patriotism, the latent and 
the patent, his kind was essentially the latter. Some 
people for whom the world is various and universal, 
and who dread nothing so much as seeing it minim- 
ized, regard this particular sentiment as a purely prac- 
tical one, a prescription of duty in a given case, like 
a knack with the coiled hose when the house is on 
fire or the plunge of the swimmer when a man is 
overboard. They grudge it a place in the foreground 
of the spirit — they consider that it shuts out the view. 
Others find it constantly comfortable and perpetually 
fresh — find, as it were, the case always given ; for them 
the immediate view is the view and the very atmosphere 
of the mind, so that it is a question not only of perform- 
ance, but of contemplation as well. Mr. Lowell's ho- 
rizon was too wide to be curtained out, and his intel- 
lectual curiosity such as to have effectually prevented 
his shutting himself up in his birth-chamber ; but if 
the local idea never kept his intelligence at home, 
he solved the difficulty by at least never going forth 
without it. When he quitted the hearth it was with 
the household god in his hand, and as he delighted 
in Europe, it was to Europe that he took it. Never 
had a household god such a magnificent outing, nor 
was made free of so many strange rites and climes ; 
never, in short, had any patriotism such a liberal air- 
ing. If, however, Mr. Lowell was loath to admit that 



70 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the American order could have an infirmity, I think it 
was because it would have cost him so much to ac- 
knowledge that it could have communicated one to 
an object that he cherished as he cherished the Eng- 
lish tongue. That was the innermost atmosphere of 
his mind, and he never could have afforded on this 
general question any policy but a policy of annexa- 
tion. He was capable of convictions in the light of 
which it was clear that the language he wrote so ad- 
mirably had encountered in the United States not 
corruption, but conservation. Any conviction of his 
on this subject was a contribution to science, and he 
was zealous to show that the speech of New England 
was most largely that of an England older and more 
vernacular than the England that to-day finds it queer. 
He was capable of writing perfect American to bring 
out this archaic element. He kept in general the 
two tongues apart, save in so far as his English style 
betrayed a connection by a certain American tact in 
the art of leaving out. He was perhaps sometimes 
slightly paradoxical in the contention that the lan- 
guage had incurred no peril in its Western adventures ; 
this is the sense in which I meant just now that he 
occasionally crossed the line. The difficulty was not 
that his vision of pure English could not fail in Amer- 
ica sometimes to be clouded — the peril was for his 
vision of pure American. His standard was the high- 
est, and the wish was often no doubt father to the 
thought. " The Biglow Papers " are delightful, but 
nothing could be less like " The Biglow Papers " than 
the style of the American newspaper. He lent his 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 7 1 

wit to his theories, but one or two of them lived on 
him like unthrifty sons. 

None the less it was impossible to be witness of 
his general action during his residence in England 
without feeling that, not only by the particular things 
he did, but by the general thing he was, he contrib- 
uted to a large ideal of peace. We certainly owe to 
him (and by " we " I mean both countries — he made 
that plural elastic) a mitigation of danger. There is 
always danger between country and country, and dan- 
ger in small and shameful forms as well as big and 
inspiring ones ; but the danger is less and the dream 
of peace more rosy when they have been beguiled 
into a common admiration. A common aversion 
even will do — the essential thing is the disposition 
to share. The poet, the writer, the speaker minis- 
ters to this community; he is Orpheus with his lute 
— the lute that pacifies the great, stupid beasts of 
international prejudice ; so that if a quarrel takes 
place over the piping form of the loved of Apollo it 
is as if he were rent again by the Maenads. It was a 
charm to the observant mind to see how Mr. Lowell 
kept the Maenads in their place — a work admirably 
continued by his successor in office, who had, indeed, 
under his roof an inestimable assistant in the proc- 
ess. Mr. Phelps was not, as I may say, single-hand- 
ed; which was his predecessor's case even for some 
time prior to an irreparable bereavement. The pry- 
ing Furies — at any rate, during these years — were ef- 
fectually snubbed, and will, it is to be hoped, never 
again hold their snaky heads very high. The spell 



72 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

that worked upon them was simply the voice of civ- 
ilization, and Mr. Lowell's advantage was that he 
happened to find himself in a supremely good place 
for producing it. He produced it both conscious- 
ly and unconsciously, both officially and privately, 
from principle and from instinct, in the hundred 
spots, on the thousand occasions which it is one of 
the happiest idiosyncrasies of English life to supply ; 
and since I have spoken so distinctly of his patri- 
otism, I must add that, after all, he exercised the 
virtue most in this particular way. His new friends 
liked him because he was at once so fresh and so 
ripe, and this was predominantly what he understood 
by being a good American. It was by being one in 
this sense that he broke the heart of the Furies. 

The combination made a quality which pervaded 
his whole intellectual character; for the quality of 
his diplomatic action, of his public speeches, of his 
talk, of his influence, was simply the genius that we 
had always appreciated in his critical writings. The 
hours and places with which he had to deal were not 
equally inspiring; there was inevitably colorless com- 
pany, there were dull dinners, influences prosaic and 
functions mechanical ; but he was substantially al- 
ways the messenger of the Muses and of that partic- 
ular combination of them which had permitted him 
to include a tenth in their number — the infallible sis- 
ter to whom humor is dear. I mean that the man 
and the author, in him, were singularly convertible ; 
it was what made the author so vivid. It was also 
what made that voice of civilization to whose har- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 73 

mony I have alluded practically the same thing as the 
voice of literature. Mr. Lowell's style was an inde- 
feasible part of him, as his correspondence, if it be 
ever published, will copiously show ; it was in all rela- 
tions his natural channel of communication. This is 
why, at the opening of this paper, I ventured to speak 
of his happy exercise of a great opportunity as at bot- 
tom the revenge of letters. This, at any rate, the lit- 
erary observer was free to see in it ; such an observer 
made a cross against the day, as an anniversary for 
form, and an anniversary the more memorable that 
form, when put to tests that might have been called 
severe, was so far from being found wanting in sub- 
stance ; met the occasion, in fact, so completely. I 
do not pretend that, during Mr. Lowell's residence in 
England, the public which he found constituted there 
spent most of its time in reading his essays ; I only 
mean that the faculty it relished in him most was the 
faculty most preserved for us in his volumes of criti- 
cism. 

It is not an accident that I do not linger over the 
contents of these volumes — this has not been a part 
of my undertaking. They will not go out of fashion, 
they will keep their place and hold their own ; for 
they are full of broad-based judgment and of those 
stamped sentences of which we are as naturally re- 
tentive as of gold and silver coin. Reading them 
lately over in large portions, I was struck not only 
with the particular "good things" that abound in 
them, but with the soundness and fulness of their 
inspiration. It is intensely the air of letters, but it 



74 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

is like that of some temperate and restorative clime. 
I judge them, perhaps, with extravagant fondness, for 
I am attached to the class to which they belong; I 
like such an atmosphere, I like the aromatic odor of 
the book-room. In turning over Mr. Lowell's crit- 
ical pages I seem to hear the door close softly behind 
me and to find in the shaded lamplight the condi- 
tions most in harmony with the sentient soul of man. 
I see an apartment brown and book-lined, which is 
the place in the world most convertible into other 
places. The turning of the leaves, the crackling of 
the fire, are the only things that break its stillness — 
the stillness in which mild miracles are wrought. 
These are the miracles of evocation, of resurrection, 
of transmission, of insight, of history, of poetry. It 
may be a little room, but it is a great space ; it may 
be a deep solitude, but it is a mighty concert. In 
this critical chamber of Mr. Lowell's there is a charm, 
to my sense, in knowing Avhat is outside of the closed 
door — it intensifies both the isolation and the experi- 
ence. The big new Western order is outside, and yet 
within all seems as immemorial as Persia. It is like 
a little lighted cabin, full of the ingenuities of home, 
in the gray of a great ocean. Such ingenuities of 
home are what represent in Mr. Lowell's case the 
conservatism of the author. His home was the past 
that dipped below the verge — it was there that his 
taste was at ease. From what quarter his disciples 
in the United States will draw their sustenance it is 
too soon to say ; the question will be better answered 
when we have the disciples more clearly in our eye. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 75 

We seem already, however, to distinguish the quar- 
ter from which they will not draw it. Few of them 
as yet appear to have in their hand, or rather in their 
head, any such treasure of knowledge. 

It was when his lifetime was longest that the fruit 
of culture was finest in him and that his wit was most 
profuse. In the admirable address on Democracy 
that he pronounced at Birmingham in 1884, in the 
beautiful speech on the Harvard anniversary of 1886, 
things are so supremely well said that we feel our- 
selves reading some consecrated masterpiece ; they 
represent great literary art in its final phase of great 
naturalness. There are places where he seems in 
mystical communication with the richest sources of 
English prose. "But this imputed and vicarious 
longevity, though it may be obscurely operative in 
our lives and fortunes, is no valid offset for the short- 
ness of our days, nor widens by a hair's-breadth the 
horizon of our memories." He sounds like a young- 
er brother of Bacon and of Milton, either of whom, 
for instance, could not have uttered a statelier word 
on the subject of the relinquishment of the required 
study of Greek than that " Oblivion looks in the face 
of the Grecian Muse only to forget her errand." On 
the other hand, in the address delivered in 1884 be- 
fore the English Wordsworth Society, he sounds like 
no one but his inveterately felicitous self. In certain 
cases Wordsworth, like Elias the prophet, " ' stands 
up as fire and his word burns like a lamp.' But too 
often, when left to his own resources and to the con- 
scientious performance of the duty laid upon him to 



76 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

be a great poet quand meme, he seems diligently in- 
tent on producing fire by the primitive method of 
rubbing the dry sticks of his blank verse one against 
the other, while we stand in shivering expectation of 
the flame that never comes." It would be difficult 
to express better the curious evening chill of the 
author of "The Excursion," which is so like the con- 
scious mistake of camping out in autumn. 

It was an extreme satisfaction to the very many 
persons in England who valued Mr. Lowell's soci- 
ety that the termination of his official mission there 
proved not the termination of the episode. He came 
back for his friends — he would have done anything 
for his friends. He also, I surmise, came back some- 
what for himself, inasmuch as he entertained an af- 
fection for London which he had no reason for con- 
cealing. For several successive years he reappeared 
there with the brightening months, and I am not sure 
that this irresponsible and less rigoiously sociable 
period did not give him his justest impressions. It 
surrendered him, at any rate, more completely to his 
friends and to several close and particularly valued 
ties. He felt that he had earned the right to a few 
frank predilections. English life is a big pictured 
story-book, and he could dip into the volume where 
he liked. It was altogether delightful to turn some 
of the pages with him, and especially to pause — for 
the marginal commentary in finer type, some of it the 
model of the illuminating foot-note — over the inter- 
minable chapter of London. 

It i§ very possible not to feel the charm of Lon- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 77 

don at all ; the foreigner who feels it must be tolera- 
bly sophisticated. It marks the comparative com- 
munity of the two big branches of the English race 
that of all aliens, under this heavy pressure, Ameri- 
cans are the most submissive. They are capable of 
loving the capital of their race almost with passion, 
which for the most part is the way it is loved when it 
is not hated. The sentiment was strong in Mr. Low- 
ell ; one of the branches of his tree of knowledge had 
planted itself and taken root here, and at the end he 
came back every year to sit in the shade of it. He 
gave himself English summers, and if some people 
should say that the gift was scarcely liberal, others 
who met him on this ground will reply that such sea- 
sons- drew from him in the circle of friendship a ra- 
diance not inherent in their complexion. This asso- 
ciation became a feature of the London May and June 
— it held its own even in the rank confusion of July. 
It pervaded the quarter he repeatedly inhabited, where 
a commonplace little house, in the neighborhood of 
the Paddington station, will long wear in its narrow 
front, to the inner sense of many passers, a mystical 
gold-lettered tablet. Here he came and went, during 
several months, for such and such a succession of 
years ; here one could find him at home in the late 
afternoon, in his lengthened chair, with his cherished 
pipe and his table piled high with books. Here he 
practised little jesting hospitalities, for he was irre- 
pressibly and amusingly hospitable. Whatever he 
was in his latest time, it was, even in muffled miser- 
ies of gout, with a mastery of laughter and fprgetful- 



78 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

ness. Nothing amused him more than for people to 
dine with him, and few things certainly amused them 
as much. His youth came back to him not once for 
all, but twenty times for every occasion. He Avas 
certainly the most boyish of learned doctors. 

This was always particularly striking during the 
several weeks of August and September that he had 
formed the habit of spending at Whitby, on the York- 
shire coast. It was here, I think, that he was most 
naturally at his ease, most humorously evaded the 
hard bargain of time. The place is admirable — an 
old, red-roofed fishing-town in one of the indentations 
of a high, brave coast, with the ruins of a great abbey 
just above it, an expanse of purple moor behind, and 
a convenient extension in the way of an informal little 
modern watering-place. The mingled breath of the 
sea and the heather makes a medium that it is a joy 
to inhale, and all the land is picturesque and noble, 
a happy hunting-ground for the good walker and the 
lover of grand lines and fine detail. Mr. Lowell was 
wonderful in both these characters, and it was in the 
active exercise of them that I saw him last. He was 
in such conditions a delightful host and a prime ini- 
tiator. Two of these happy summer days on the oc- 
casion of his last visit to Whitby are marked posses- 
sions of my memory; one of them a ramble on the 
warm, wide moors, after a rough lunch at a little, 
stony upland inn, in company charming and inti- 
mate, the thought of which to-day is a reference to 
a double loss ; the other an excursion, made partly 
by a longish piece of railway, in his society alone, to 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 79 

Rievaulx Abbey, most fragmentary, but most grace- 
ful, of ruins. The day at Rievaulx was as exquisite 
as I could have wished it if I had known that it de- 
noted a limit, and in the happy absence of any such 
revelation altogether given up to adventure and suc- 
cess. I remember the great curving green terrace 
in Lord Feversham's park — prodigious and surely 
unique ; it hangs over the abbey like a theatrical 
curtain — and the temples of concord, or whatever 
they are, at either end of it, and the lovable view, 
and the dear little dowdy inn-parlor at Helmsley, 
where there is, moreover, a massive fragment of pro- 
faner ruin, a bit of battered old castle, in the grassy 
fir'eau of which (it was a perfect English picture) a 
company of well-grown young Yorkshire folk of both 
sexes were making lawn-tennis balls fly in and out of 
the past. I recall with vividness the very waits and 
changes of the return and our pleased acceptance of 
everything. We parted on the morrow, but I met 
Mr. Lowell a little later in Devonshire — O clustered 
charms of Ottery ! — and spent three days in his com- 
pany. I travelled back to London with him, and saw 
him for the last time at Paddington. He was to sail 
immediately for America. I went to take leave of 
him, but I missed him, and a day or two later he was 
gone. 

I note these particulars, as may easily be imag- 
ined, wholly for their reference to himself — for the 
emphasized occasion they give to remembrance and 
regret. Yet even remembrance and regret, in such a 
case, have a certain free relief, for our final thought 



80 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

of James Russell Lowell is that what he consistently 
lived for remains of him. There is nothing ineffect- 
ual in his name and fame — they stand for large and 
delightful things. He is one of the happy figures of 
literature. He had his trammels and his sorrows, 
but he drank deep of the tonic draught, and he will 
long count as an erect fighting figure on the side of 
optimism and beauty. He was strong without nar- 
rowness, he was wise without bitterness and glad 
without fatuity. That appears for the most part the 
temper of those who speak from the quiet English 
heart, the steady pulses of which were the sufficient 
rhythm of his eloquence. This source of influence 
will surely not forfeit its long credit in the world so 
long as we continue occasionally to know it by what 
is so rich in performance and so stainless in char- 
acter. 

1891. 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 

Mrs. Kemble used often to say of people who met 
her during the later years of her life, " No wonder 
they were surprised and bewildered, poor things — 
they supposed I was dead!" Dying January 15th, 
1893, in her eighty-third year, she had outlived a 
whole order of things, her "time," as we call it, and 
in particular so many of her near contemporaries, so 
many relations and friends, witnesses and admirers, 
so much, too, of her own robust and ironic interest in 
life, that the event, as regards attention excited, may 
well be said to have introduced her to unconscious 
generations. To that little group of the faithful for 
whom she had represented rare things, and who stood 
by with the sense of an emptier and vulgarer world 
when, at Kensal Green, her remains were laid in the 
same earth as her father's, the celebrity of an age 
almost antediluvian — to these united few the form in 
which the attention I speak of roused itself was for 
the most part a strange revelation of ignorance. It 
was in so many cases — I allude, though perhaps I 
ought not, to some of the newspapers — also a revela- 
tion of flippant ill-nature trying to pass as informa- 
tion, that the element of perplexity was added to the 
element of surprise. Mrs. Kemble all her life was 
6 



82 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

so great a figure for those who were not in ignorance, 
the distinction and interest of her character were, 
among them, so fundamental an article of faith, that 
such persons were startled at finding themselves called 
to be, not combative in the cause of her innumerable 
strong features (they were used to that), but insistent 
in respect to her eminence. No common attachment 
probably ever operated as a more genial bond, a more 
immediate password, than an appreciation of this ex- 
traordinary woman ; so that inevitably, to-day, those 
who had the privilege in the evening of her life of 
knowing her better will have expressed to each other 
the hope for some commemoration more proportion- 
ate. The testimony of such of them as might have 
hesitated will certainly in the event have found itself 
singularly quickened. The better word will yet be 
spoken, and indeed if it should drop from all the lips 
to which it has risen with a rush, Mrs. Kemble's fine 
memory would become the occasion of a lively liter- 
ature. She was an admirable subject for the crystal- 
lization of anecdote, for encompassing legend. If we 
have a definite after-life in the amount of illustration 
that may gather about us, few vivid names ought to 
fade more slowly. 

As it was not, however, the least interesting thing 
in her that she was composed of contrasts and oppo- 
sites, so the hand that should attempt a living por- 
trait would be conscious of some conflicting counsel. 
The public and the private were both such inevitable 
consequences of her nature that we take perforce into 
account the difficulty of reconciling one with the other. 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 83 

If she had had no public hour there would have 
been so much less to admire her for ; and if she had 
not hated invasion and worldly noise we should not 
have measured her disinterestedness and her noble 
indifference. A prouder nature never affronted the 
long humiliation of life, and to few persons can it 
have mattered less on the whole how either before or 
after death the judgment of men was likely to sound. 
She had encountered publicity as she had encoun- 
tered bad weather; but the public, on these occa- 
sions, was much more aware of her, I think, than she 
was aware of the public. With her immense sense 
of comedy she would have been amused at being vin- 
dicated, and leaving criticism far behind, would have 
contributed magnificent laughable touches — in the 
wonderful tone in which she used to read her Falstaff 
or even her Mrs. Quickly — to any picture of her pe- 
culiarities. She talked of herself in unreserved verses, 
in published records and reminiscences ; but this over- 
flow of her conversation, for it was nothing more, was 
no more directed at an audience than a rural pedes- 
trian's humming of a tune. She talked as she went, 
from wealth of animal spirits. She had a reason for 
everything she did (not always, perhaps, a good one), 
but the last reason she would have given for writing 
her books was the desire to see if people would read 
them. Her attitude towards publication was as little 
like the usual attitude in such a matter as possible 
— which was true indeed of almost any relation in 
which she happened to find herself to any subject. 
Therefore if it is impossible to say for her how large 



84 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

she was without going into the details, we may re- 
member both her own aloofness and her own spon- 
taneity, and above all, that every impulse to catch 
her image before it melts away is but a natural echo 
of her presence. That intense presence simply con- 
tinues to impose itself. 

Not the least of the sources of its impressiveness 
in her later years was the historic value attached to 
it — its long backward reach into time. Even if Mrs. 
Kemble had been a less remarkable person she would 
have owed a distinction to the far-away past to which 
she gave continuity, would have been interesting from 
the curious contacts she was able, as it were, to trans- 
mit. She made us touch her aunt Mrs. Siddons, and 
whom does Mrs. Siddons not make us touch ? She 
had sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for her portrait, and 
Sir Thomas Lawrence was in love with Sir Joshua's 
Tragic Muse. She had breakfasted with Sir Walter 
Scott, she had sung with Tom Moore, she had list- 
ened to Edmund Kean and to Mademoiselle Mars. 
These things represented a privilege of which the 
intensity grew with successive years, with the growth 
of a modernness in which she found herself — not in 
the least plaintively indeed — expatriated. The case 
was the more interesting that the woman herself was 
deeply so ; relics are apt to be dead, and Mrs. Kem- 
ble, for all her antecedents, was a force long unspent. 
She could communicate the thrill if her auditor could 
receive it ; the want of vibration was much more like- 
ly to be in the auditor. She had been, in short, a 
celebrity in the twenties, had attracted the town while 



* 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 85 



the century was still almost as immature as herself. 
The great thing was that from the first she had abun- 
dantly lived and, in more than one meaning of the 
word, acted — felt, observed, imagined, reflected, rea- 
soned, gathered in her passage the abiding impres- 
sion, the sense and suggestion of things. That she 
was the last of the greater Kembles could never be a 
matter of indifference, even to those of her friends 
who had reasons less abstract for being fond of her ; 
and it was a part of her great range and the immense 
variety of the gifts by which she held attention, whisked 
it from one kind of subjugation to another, that the 
"town" she had astonished in her twentieth year 
was, for the London-lover, exactly the veritable town, 
that of the old books and prints, the old legends and 
landmarks. Her own love for London, like her en- 
durance of Paris, was small ; she treated her birth- 
place at best— it was the way she treated many things 
— as an alternative that would have been impossible 
if she had cared ; but the great city had laid its hand 
upon her from the first (she was born in that New- 
man Street which had a later renown, attested by 
Thackeray, as the haunt of art-students and one of 
the boundaries of Bohemia), playing a large part in 
her mingled experience and folding her latest life in 
an embrace which could be grandmotherly even for 
old age. 

She had figured in the old London world, which 
lived again in her talk and, to a great degree, in her 
habits and standards and tone. This background, 
embroidered with her theatrical past, so unassimi- 



86 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

lated, but so vivid in her handsome hereditary head 
and the unflagging drama of her manner, was helped 
by her agitated, unsettled life to make her what I 
have called historic. If her last twenty years were 
years of rest, it was impossible for an observer of 
them not to feel from how many things she was rest- 
ing — from how long a journey and how untempered 
a fate, what an expenditure of that rich personal- 
ity which always moved all together and with all 
its violent force. Whatever it was, at any rate, this 
extraordinary mixture of incongruous things, of Eng- 
land and France in her blood, of America and Eng- 
land in her relationships, of the footlights and the 
glaciers in her activity, of conformity and contumacy 
in her character, and tragedy and comedy in her talk 
— whatever it was, there was always this strangeness 
and this amusement for the fancy, that the beginning 
of it had been anything so disconnected as the elder 
Covent Garden, the Covent Garden of Edmund Kean 
(I find his name on a playbill of the year of her first 
appearance), and a tremendous success as Juliet in 
1829. There was no convenient and handy formula 
for Mrs. Kemble's genius, and one had to take her 
career, the juxtaposition of her interests, exactly as 
one took her disposition, for a remarkably fine clus- 
ter of inconsistencies. But destiny had turned her 
out a Kemble, and had taken for granted of a Kem- 
ble certain things — especially a theatre and a tone ; 
in this manner she was enabled to present as fine an 
example as one could wish of submission to the gen- 
eral law at the sacrifice of every approach, not to 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 87 

freedom, which she never could forego, but to the 
superficial symmetry that enables critics to classify. 
This facility her friends enjoyed with her as little as 
they enjoyed some others ; but it was a small draw- 
back in the perception of that variety, the result of 
many endowments, which made other company by 
contrast alarmingly dull and yet left one always un- 
der the final impression of her sincerity. It was her 
character, in its generosity and sincerity, that was 
simple ; it was her great gifts and her intelligence 
that banished the insular from her attitude and even, 
with her rich vein of comedy, made a temptation for 
her of the bewilderment of the simple. 

Since it was indeed, however, as the daughter of 
the Kembles, the histrionic figure, the far-away girl- 
ish Juliet and Julia, that the world primarily regarded 
her and that her admirably mobile face and expres- 
sive though not effusive manner seemed, with how- 
ever little intention, to present her, this side of her 
existence should doubtless be disposed of at the out- 
set of any attempted sketch of her, even should such 
a sketch be confined by limits permitting not the 
least minuteness. She left it behind her altogether 
as she went, very early in life indeed, but her prac- 
tice of theatrical things is a point the more interest- 
ing as it threw a strong light not only on many of 
those things themselves, but on the nature of her 
remarkable mind. No such mind and no such char- 
acter were surely in any other case concerned with 
them. Besides having an extreme understanding of 
them, she had an understanding wholly outside of 



88 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

them and larger than any place they can fill ; and if 
she came back to them in tone, in reminiscence, in 
criticism (she was susceptible to playhouse beguile- 
ment to her very latest years), it was a return from 
excursions which ought logically to have resulted in 
alienation. Nobody connected with the stage could 
have savored less of the " shop." She was a reac- 
tionary Kemble enough, but if she got rid of her 
profession she could never get rid of her instincts, 
which kept her dramatic long after she ceased to be 
theatrical. They existed in her, as her unsurpassable 
voice and facial play existed, independently of ambi- 
tion or cultivation, of disenchantment or indifference. 
She never ceased to be amusing on the subject of 
that vivid face which was so much more scenic than 
she intended, and always declined to be responsible 
for her manner, her accents, her eyes. These things, 
apart from family ties, were her only link with the 
stage, which she had from the first disliked too much 
to have anything so submissive as a taste about it. 
It was a convenience for her which heredity made 
immediate, just as it was a convenience to write, off- 
hand, the most entertaining books, which from the 
day they went to the publisher she never thought of 
again nor listened to a word about ; books inspired 
by her spirits, really, the high spirits and the low, by 
her vitality, her love of utterance and of letters, her 
natural positiveness. She took conveniences for 
granted in life, and, full as she was of ideas and 
habits, hated pretensions about personal things and 
fine names for plain ones. There never was any 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 89 

felicity in approaching her on the ground of her writ- 
ings, or indeed in attempting to deal with her as a 
woman professedly "intellectual," a word that, in 
her horror of coteries and current phrases, she always 
laughed to scorn. 

All these repudiations together, however, didn't 
alter the fact that when the author of these pages 
was a very small boy the reverberation of her first 
visit to the United States, though it had occurred 
years before, was still in the air : I allude to the 
visit of 1832, with her father, of which her first 
" Journal," published in 1835, is so curious, so 
amusing, and, with its singular testimony to the taste 
of the hour, so living a specimen. This early book, 
by the way, still one of the freshest pictures of what 
is called a "brilliant girl" that our literature pos- 
sesses, justifies wonderfully, with its spontaneity and 
gayety, the sense it gives of variety and vitality, of 
easy powers and overtopping spirits, the great com- 
motion she produced in her youth. Marie Bashkirt- 
seff was in the bosom of the future, but as a girlish 
personality she had certainly been anticipated ; in 
addition to which it may be said that a comparison 
of the two diaries would doubtless lead to considera- 
tions enough on the difference between health and 
disease. However this may be, one of the earliest 
things that I remember with any vividness is a drive 
in the country, near New York, in the course of 
which the carriage passed a lady on horseback who 
had stopped to address herself with some vivacity 
to certain men at work by the road. Just as we had 



90 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

got further one of my elders exclaimed to the other, 
" Why, it's Fanny Kemble !" and on my inquiring 
who was the bearer of this name, which fell upon 
my ear for the first time, I was informed that she 
was a celebrated actress. It was added, I think, 
that she was a brilliant reader of Shakespeare, 
though I am not certain that the incident occurred 
after she had begun her career of reading. The 
American cities, at any rate, were promptly filled 
with the glory of this career, so that there was a 
chance for me to be vaguely perplexed as to the 
bearing on the performance, which I heard con- 
stantly alluded to, of her equestrian element, so large 
a part of her youth. Did she read on horseback, or 
was her acting one of the attractions of the circus ? 
There had been something in the circumstances 
(perhaps the first sight of a living Amazon — an ap- 
parition comparatively rare then in American sub- 
urbs) to keep me from forgetting the lady, about 
whom gathered still other legends than the glamour 
of the theatre ; at all events she was planted from 
that moment so firmly in my mind that when, as a 
more developed youngster, after an interval of several 
years, I was taken for education's sake to hear her, 
the occasion was primarily a relief to long suspense. 
It became, however, and there was another that fol- 
lowed it, a joy by itself and an impression inefface- 
able. 

This was in London, and I remember even from 
such a distance of time every detail of the picture 
and every tone of her voice. The two readings — ■ 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 



91 



one was of King Lear, the other of A Midsummer- 
Nighfs Dream — took place in certain Assembly 
Rooms in St. John's Wood, which, in immediate con- 
tiguity to the Eyre Arms tavern, appear still to exist, 
and which, as I sometimes pass, I even yet never 
catch a glimpse of without a faint return of the 
wonder and the thrill. The choice of the place, then 
a " local centre," shows how London ways have al- 
tered. The reader dressed in black velvet for Lear 
and in white satin for the comedy, and presented 
herself to my young vision as a being of formidable 
splendor. I must have measured in some degree 
the power and beauty of her performance, for I per- 
fectly recall the sense of irreparable privation with 
which a little later I heard my parents describe the 
emotion produced by her Othello, given at the old 
Hanover Square Rooms and to which I had not 
been conducted. I have seen both the tragedy and 
the " Dream " acted several times since then, but I 
have always found myself waiting vainly for any 
approach to the splendid volume of Mrs. Kemble's 
" Howl, howl, howl ! " in the one, or to the anima- 
tion and variety that she contributed to the other. 
I am confident that the most exquisite of fairy-tales 
never was such a " spectacle " as when she read, I 
was going to say mounted, it. Is this reminiscence 
of the human thunder-roll that she produced in Lear 
in some degree one of the indulgences with which 
we treat our childhood ? I think not, in the light 
of innumerable subsequent impressions. These 
showed that the force and the imagination were 



92 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

still there ; why then should they not, in the prime 
of their magnificent energy, have borne their fruit ? 
The former of the two qualities, leaving all the 
others, those of intention and discrimination, out of 
account, sufficed by itself to excite the astonishment 
of a genius no less energetic than Madame Ristori, 
after she had tasted for a couple of hours of the life 
that Mrs. Kemble's single personality could impart 
to a Shakespearean multitude. " Che forza, ma che 
forza, che forza ! " she kept repeating, regarding it 
simply as a feat of powers 

It is always a torment to the later friends of the 
possessor of a great talent to have to content them- 
selves with the supposition and the hearsay ; but in 
Mrs. Kemble's society there were precious though 
casual consolations for the treacheries of time. She 
was so saturated with Shakespeare that she had 
made him, as it were, the air she lived in, an air 
that stirred with his words whenever she herself was 
moved, whenever she was agitated or impressed, re- 
minded or challenged. He was indeed her utterance, 
the language she spoke when she spoke most from 
herself. He had said the things that she would 
have wished most to say, and it was her greatest 
happiness, I think, that she could always make him 
her obeisance by the same borrowed words that ex- 
pressed her emotion. She was as loyal to him — 
and it is saying not a little — as she was to those 
most uplifted Alps which gave her the greater part 
of the rest of her happiness and to which she paid 
her annual reverence with an inveteracy, intensely 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 93 

characteristic, that neither public nor private commo- 
tions, neither revolutions nor quarantines, neither war 
nor pestilence nor floods, could disconcert. There- 
fore one came in for many windfalls, for echoes 
and refrains, for snatches of speeches and scenes. 
These things were unfailing illustrations of the great 
luxury one had been born to miss. Moreover, there 
were other chances — the chances of anecdote, of as- 
sociation, and that, above all, of her company at 
the theatre, or rather on the return from the the- 
atre, to which she often went, occasions when, on 
getting, after an interval of profound silence, to 
a distance — never till then — some train of quo- 
tation and comparison was kindled. As all roads 
lead to Rome, so all humor and all pathos, all 
quotation, all conversation, it may be said, led for 
Mrs. Kemble to the poet she delighted in and for 
whose glory it was an advantage — one's respect 
needn't prevent one from adding — that she was so 
great a talker. 

Twice again, after these juvenile evenings I have 
permitted myself to recall, I had the opportunity of 
hearing her read whole plays. This she did repeat- 
edly, though she had quitted public life, in one or 
two American cities after the civil war ; she had 
never been backward in lending such aid to " ap- 
peals," to charitable causes, and she had a sort of 
American patriotism, a strange and conditioned sen- 
timent of which there is more to be said, a love for 
the United States which was a totally different mat- 
ter from a liking, and which, from 1861 to 1865, 



94 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

made her throb with American passions. She re- 
turned to her work to help profusely the Sanitary 
Commission or some other deserving enterprise that 
was a heritage of the war-time. One of the plays I 
speak of in this connection was The Merchant of 
Venice, the other was Henry V. No Portia was so 
noble and subtle as that full-toned Portia of hers — 
such a picturesque great lady, such a princess of 
poetry and comedy. This circumstance received 
further light on an occasion — years afterwards, in 
London — of my going to see the play with her. If 
the performance had been Shakespearean there was 
always an epilogue that was the real interest of the 
evening — a beautiful rail)'', often an exquisite protest, 
of all her own instinct, in the brougham, in the 
Strand, in the Brompton Road. Those who some- 
times went with her to the play in the last years of 
her life will remember the Juliets, the Beatrices, the 
Rosalinds whom she could still make vivid without 
an accessory except the surrounding London uproar. 
There was a Beatrice in particular, one evening, who 
seemed to have stepped with us into the carriage in 
pursuance of her demonstration that this charming 
creature, all rapidity and resonance of wit, should 
ring like a silver bell. We might have been to the 
French comedy — the sequel was only the more inter- 
esting, for, with her love of tongues and her ease in 
dealing with them, her gift of tone was not so poor a 
thing as to be limited to her own language. Her 
own language indeed was a plural number ; French 
rose to her lips as quickly and as racily as English, 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 95 

and corresponded to the strong strain she owed to 
the foreignness of her remarkable mother, a person 
as to whom, among the many persons who lived in 
her retrospects, it was impossible, in her company, 
not to feel the liveliest curiosity ; so natural was it 
to be convinced of the distinction of the far-away 
lady whose easy gift to the world had been two such 
daughters as Fanny Kemble and Adelaide Sartoris. 
There were indeed friends of these brilliant women 
— all their friends of alien birth, it may be said, and 
the list was long — who were conscious of a very 
direct indebtedness to the clever and continental 
Mrs. Charles Kemble, an artist, recordedly, and a 
character. She had in advance enlarged the situa- 
tion, multiplied the elements, contributed space and 
air. Had she not notably interposed in the interest 
of that facility of intercourse to which nothing min- 
isters so much as an imagination for the difference 
of human races and the variety of human condi- 
tions ? 

This imagination Mrs. Kemble, as was even more 
the case with her eminent sister, had in abundance ; 
her conversation jumped gayly the Chinese wall, and 
if she " didn't like foreigners " it was not, as many 
persons can attest, because she didn't understand 
them. She declared of herself, freely — no faculty for 
self-derision was ever richer or droller — that she was 
not only intensely English, but the model of the Brit- 
ish Philistine. She knew what she meant, and so as- 
suredly did her friends ; but somehow the statement 
was always made in French ; it took her foreignness 



96 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

to support it : " Ah, vous savez, je suis Anglaise, moi 
— la plus Anglaise dcs Anglaises /" That happily 
didn't prevent the voice of Mademoiselle Mars from 
being still in her ear, nor, more importunately yet, 
the voice of the great Rachel, nor deprive her of the 
ability to awaken these wonderful echoes. Her mem- 
ory was full of the great speeches of the old French 
drama, and it was in her power especially to console, 
in free glimpses, those of her interlocutors who lan- 
guished under the sorrow of having come too late 
for Camille and Hermione. The moment at which, 
however, she remembered Rachel's deep voice most 
gratefully was that of a certain grave " Bieii, Ires 
Men /" dropped by it during a private performance of 
The Hunchback, for a charity, at Bridgewater House, I 
think, when the great actress, a spectator, happened to 
be seated close to the stage, and the Julia, after one 
of her finest moments, caught the words. She could 
repeat, moreover, not only the classic tirades, but 
all sorts of drolleries, couplets and prose, from long- 
superseded vaudevilles — witness Grassot's shriek, 
"Approchez-vouz plus loin /" as the scandalized daugh- 
ter of Albion in Les Anglaises pour Rire. I scarcely 
know whether to speak or to be silent — in connection 
with such remembrances of my own — on the subject 
of a strange and sad attempt, one evening, to sit 
through a performance of The Hunchback, a play in 
which, in her girlhood, she had been, and so trium- 
phantly, the first representative of the heroine, and 
which, oddly enough, she had never seen from "in 
front." She had gone, reluctantly and sceptically, 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 97 

only because something else that had been planned 
had failed at the last, and the sense of responsibility 
became acute on her companion's part when, after 
the performance had begun, he perceived the turn 
the affair was likely to take. It was a vulgar and 
detestable rendering, and the distress of it became 
greater than could have been feared : it brought back 
across the gulf of years her different youth and all 
the ghosts of the dead, the first interpreters — her fa- 
ther, Charles Kemble, the Sir Thomas Clifford, Sheri- 
dan Knowles himself, the Master Walter, the van- 
ished Helen, the vanished Modus : they seemed, in 
the cold, half-empty house and before the tones of 
their successors, to interpose a mute reproach — a re- 
proach that looked intensely enough out of her eyes 
when at last, under her breath, she turned to her em- 
barrassed neighbor with a tragic, an unforgettable 
" How could you bring me to see this thing ?" 

I have mentioned that Henry V. was the last play 
I heard her read in public, and I remember a dec- 
laration of hers that it was the play she loved best 
to read, better even than those that yielded poetry 
more various. It was gallant and martial and in- 
tensely English, and she was certainly on such even- 
ings the " Anglaise des Anglaises " she professed to be. 
Her splendid tones and her face, lighted like that of a 
war-goddess, seemed to fill the performance with the 
hurry of armies and the sound of battle ; as in her 
rendering of A Midsummer '- Night 's Dream, so the 
illusion was that of a multitude and a pageant. I re- 
call the tremendous ring of her voice, somewhat di- 
7 



98 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

minished as it then was, in the culminating " God for 
Harry, England, and Saint George !" a voice the im- 
mense effect of which, in her finest years — the oc- 
casion, for instance, of her brief return to the stage 
in 1847 — an °ld friend just illustrates to me by a 
reminiscence. She was acting at that period at 
the Princess's Theatre, with Macready, in whom my 
informant, then a very young man and an unfledged 
journalist, remembers himself to have been, for some 
reason, "surprisingly disappointed." It all seems 
very ancient history. On one of the evenings of Mac- 
beth he was making his way, by invitation, to Douglas 
Jerrold's box — Douglas Jerrold had a newspaper — 
when, in the passage, he was arrested by the sense 
that Mrs. Kemble was already on the stage, reading 
the letter with which Lady Macbeth makes her en- 
trance. The manner in which she read it, the tone 
that reached his ears, held him motionless and spell- 
bound till she had finished. To nothing more beauti- 
ful had he ever listened, nothing more beautiful was 
he ever to hear again. This was the sort of impres- 
sion commemorated in Longfellow's so sincere sonnet, 
" Ah, precious evenings, all too swiftly sped !" Such 
evenings for the reader herself sped swiftly as well, 
no doubt ; but they proceeded with a regularity alto- 
gether, in its degree, characteristic of her, and some 
of the rigidities of which she could relate with a droll- 
ery that yielded everything but the particular point. 
The particular point she never yielded — she only 
yielded afterwards, in overwhelming profusion, some 
other quite different, though to herself possibly much 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 99 

more inconvenient one : a characteristic of an order 
that one of her friends probably had in mind in de- 
claring that to have a difference with her was a much 
less formidable thing than to make it up. 

Her manner of dealing with her readings was the 
despair of her agents and managers, whom she pro- 
foundly commiserated, whom she vividly imitated, 
and who, in their wildest experience of the " tempera- 
ment of genius " and the oddities of the profession, 
had never encountered her idiosyncrasies. It threw, 
indeed, the strongest light upon the relation in which 
her dramatic talent, and the faculty that in a different 
nature one would call as a matter of course her artis- 
tic sense stood to the rest of her mind , a relation in 
which such powers, on so great a scale, have probably 
never but in that single instance found themselves. 
On the artistic question, in short, she was unique ; 
she disposed of it by a summary process. In other 
words, she would none of it at all, she recognized in no 
degree its application to herself. It once happened 
that one of her friends, in a moment of extraordi- 
nary inadvertence, permitted himself to say to her in 
some argument, " Such a clever woman as you !" He 
measured the depth of his fall when she challenged 
him with one of her facial flashes and a " How dare 
you call me anything so commonplace ?" This could 
pass ; but no one could have had the temerity to tell 
her she was an artist. The chance to discriminate 
was too close at hand ; if she was an artist, what name 
was left for her sister Adelaide, of musical fame, who, 
with an histrionic equipment scarcely inferior to her 



IOO ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

own, lived in the brightest air of aesthetics? Mrs. 
Kemble's case would have been an exquisite one for 
a psychologist interested in studying the constitution 
of sincerity. That word expresses the special light 
by which she worked, though it doubtless would not 
have solved the technical problem for her if she had 
not had the good-fortune to be a Kemble. She was a 
moralist who had come out of a theatrical nest, and if 
she read Shakespeare in public it was very much be- 
cause she loved him, loved him in a way that made it 
odious to her to treat him so commercially. She read 
straight through the list of his plays — those that con- 
stituted her repertory, offering them in a succession 
from which no consideration of profit or loss ever in- 
duced her to depart. Some of them " drew " more 
than others, The Merchant of Venice more than Meas- 
ure for Measure, As Yon Like It more than Coriolanus, 
and to these her men of business vainly tried to in- 
duce her either to confine herself or to give a more 
frequent place : her answer was always her immutable 
order, and her first service was to her master. If on 
a given evening the play didn't fit the occasion, so 
much the worse for the occasion : she had spoken for 
her poet, and if he had more variety than the " public 
taste," this was only to his honor. 

Like all passionate workers, Mrs. Kemble had her 
own convictions about the public taste, and those 
who knew her, moreover, couldn't fail to be acquaint- 
ed with the chapter — it was a large one — of her 
superlative Quixotisms. During her American visits, 
before the war, she would never read in the Southern 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 101 

States : it was a part of the consistency with which 
she disapproved of sources of payment proceeding 
from the "peculiar institution." This was a large 
field of gain closed to her, for her marriage to Mr. 
Butler, her residence in Georgia and the events which 
followed it, culminating in her separation, had given 
her, in the South, a conspicuity, a retentissement, of 
the kind that an impresario rejoices in. What would 
have been precisely insupportable to her was that 
people should come not for Shakespeare but for 
Fanny Kemble, and she simply did everything she 
could to prevent it. Comically out of his reckoning 
was one of these gentlemen with whom she once hap- 
pened to talk of a young French actress whose Juliet, 
in London, had just been a nine days' wonder. " Sup- 
pose," she said, with derision, " that, telle que vous me 
voyez, I should go over to Paris and appear as Celi- 
mene !" Mrs. Kemble had not forgotten the light of 
speculation kindled in her interlocutor's eye as he 
broke out, with cautious and respectful eagerness, 
" You're not, by chance — a — thinking of it, madam ?" 
The only thing that, during these busy years, she had 
been "thinking of" was the genius of the poet it 
was her privilege to interpret, in whom she found all 
greatness and beauty, and with whom for so long she 
had the great happiness (except her passion for the 
Alps the only really secure happiness she knew) of 
living in daily intimacy. There had been other large 
rewards which would have been thrice as large for a 
person without those fine perversities that one honored 
even while one smiled at them, but above all there 



102 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

had been that one. " Think," she often said in later 
years, "think, if you please, what company /" It be- 
fell, on some occasion of her being in one of her fre- 
quent and admirable narrative moods, that a friend 
was sufficiently addicted to the perpetual puzzle of 
art to ask her what preparation, in a series of read- 
ings, what degree of rehearsal, as it were, she found 
necessary for performances so arduous and so com- 
plex. " Rehearsal ?" — she was, with all the good faith 
in the world, almost scandalized at the idea. " I may 
have read over the play, and I think I kept myself 
quiet." " But was nothing determined, established 
in advance ? weren't your lines laid down, your points 
fixed?" This was an inquiry which Mrs. Kemble 
could treat with all the gayety of her irony, and in the 
light of which her talent exhibited just that discon- 
certing wilfulness I have already spoken of. She 
would have been a capture for the disputants who 
pretend that the actor's emotion must be real, if she 
had not been indeed, with her hatred both of enrol- 
ment and of tea-party aesthetics, too dangerous a re- 
cruit for any camp. Priggishness and pedantry ex- 
cited her ire ; woe therefore to those who collectively 
might have presumed she was on their "side." 

She was artistically, I think, a very fine anomaly, 
and, in relation to the efficacity of what may be called 
the natural method, the operation of pure sincerity, 
a witness no less interesting than unconscious. An 
equally active and fruitful love of beauty was prob- 
ably never accompanied with so little technical curi- 
osity. Her endowment was so rich, her spirit so 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE I03 

proud, her temper so high, that, as she was an im- 
mense success, they made her indifference and her 
eccentricity magnificent. From what she would have 
been as a failure the imagination averts its face , and 
if her only receipt for " rendering " Shakespeare was 
to live with him and try to be worthy of him, there 
are many aspirants it would not have taken far on the 
way. Nor would one have expected it to be the pre- 
cursor of performances masterly in their finish. Such 
simplicities were easy to a person who had Mrs. 
Kemble's organ, her presence, and her rare percep- 
tions. I remember going many years ago, in the 
United States, to call on her in company with a lady 
who had borrowed from her a volume containing one 
of Calderon's plays translated by Edward Fitzgerald. 
This lady had brought the book back, and knowing 
her sufficiently well (if not sufficiently ill !) to venture 
to be pressing, expressed her desire that she should 
read us one of the great Spaniard's finest passages. 
Mrs. Kemble, giving reasons, demurred, but finally 
suffered herself to be persuaded. The scene struck 
me at the time, I remember, as a reproduction of 
some anecdotic picture I had carried in my mind of 
the later days of Mrs. Siddons — Mrs. Siddons read- 
ing Milton in her mob-cap and spectacles. The 
sunny drawing-room in the country, the morning fire, 
the " Berlin wools " of the hostess and her rich old- 
English quality, which always counted double beyond 
the seas, seemed in a manner a reconstitution, com- 
pleted, if I am not mistaken, by the presence of Sir 
Thomas Lawrence's magnificent portrait of her grand- 



104 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

mother, Mrs. Roger Kemble — "the old lioness her- 
self," as he, or some one else, had called her, the 
mother of all the brood. Mrs. Kemble read, then, as 
she only could read, and, the poetry of the passage 
being of the noblest, with such rising and visible, such 
extreme and increasing emotion, that I presently be- 
came aware of her having suddenly sought refuge 
from a disaster in a cry of resentment at the pass she 
had been brought to, and in letting the book fly from 
her hand and hurtle across the room. All her " art " 
was in the incident. 

It was just as much and just as little in her talk, 
scarcely less than her dramatic faculty a part of her 
fine endowment and, indeed, scarcely at all to be 
distinguished from it. Her conversation opened its 
doors wide to all parts of her mind, and all expression, 
with her, was singularly direct and immediate. Her 
great natural resources put a premium, as it were, on 
expression, so that there might even have been ground 
for wondering to what exaggeration it would have 
tended had not such perfect genuineness been at the 
root. It was exactly this striking natural form, the 
channel open to it, that made the genuineness so un- 
embarrassed. Full as she was, in reflection, of ele- 
ments that might have excluded each other, she was 
at the same time, socially and in action, so much of 
one piece, as the phrase is, that her different gifts 
were literally portions of each other. As her talk 
was part of her drama, so, as I have intimated, her 
writing was part of her talk. It had the same free 
sincerity as her conversation, and an equal absence 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 1 05 

of that quality which may be called in social inter- 
course diplomacy and in literature preoccupation or 
even ambition or even vanity. It cannot often have 
befallen her in her long life to pronounce the great 
word Culture — the sort of term she invariably looked 
at askance ; but she had acted in the studious spirit 
without knowing that it had so fine a name. She had 
always lived with books and had the habit and, as it 
were, the hygiene of them ; never, moreover (as a 
habit would not have been hers without some odd in- 
tensity), laying down a volume that she had begun, or 
failing to read any that was sent her or lent her. Her 
friends were often witnesses of heroic, of monstrous 
feats of this kind. " I read everything that is given 
me, except the newspaper — and from beginning to 
end," she was wont to say with that almost touch- 
ing docility with which so many of her rebellions 
were lovably underlaid. There was something of the 
same humility in her fondness for being read to, even 
by persons professing no proficiency in the art — an 
attitude indeed that, with its great mistress for a list- 
ener, was the only discreet one to be assumed. All 
this had left her equally enriched and indifferent , she 
never dreamed of being a woman of letters — her wit 
and her wisdom relieved her too comfortably of such 
pretensions. Her various books, springing in every 
case but two or three straight from the real, from ex- 
perience ; personal and natural, humorous and elo- 
quent, interesting as her character and her life were 
interesting, have all her irrepressible spirit or, if the 
word be admissible, her spiritedness. The term is 



106 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

not a critical one, but the geniality (in the Germanic 
sense) of her temperament makes everything she 
wrote what is called good reading. She wrote ex- 
actly as she talked, observing, asserting, complaining, 
confiding, contradicting, crying out and bounding off, 
always effectually communicating. Last, not least, 
she uttered with her pen as well as with her lips the 
most agreeable, uncontemporary, self-respecting Eng- 
lish, as idiomatic as possible and just as little com- 
mon. There were friends to whom she was absolutely 
precious, with a preciousness historic, inexpressible, 
to be kept under glass, as one of the rare persons 
(how many of her peers are left in the world?) over 
whom the trail of the newspaper was not. I never 
saw a newspaper in her house, nor in the course of 
many years heard her so much as allude to one ; and 
as she had the habit, so she had the sense (a real 
touchstone for others) of English un defiled. French 
as she was, she hated Gallicisms in the one language 
as much as she winced at Anglicisms in the other, and 
she was a constant proof that the richest colloquial 
humor is not dependent for its success upon slang, 
least of all (as this is a matter in which distance gilds) 
upon that of the hour. I won't say that her lips were 
not occasionally crossed gracefully enough by that of 
1840. Her attitude towards Americanisms may be 
briefly disposed of — she confounded them (when she 
didn't think, as she mostly did, that Americans made 
too many phrases — then she was impelled to be scan- 
dalous) with the general modern madness for which 
the newspaper was responsible. 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE I07 

Her prose and her poetical writings are alike un- 
equal; easily the best of the former, I think, are the 
strong, insistent, one-sided " Journal of a Residence on 
a Georgia Plantation " (the most valuable account 
— and as a report of strong emotion scarcely less val- 
uable from its element of parti-pris — of impressions 
begotten by that old Southern life which we are too 
apt to see to-day as through a haze of Indian sum- 
mer), and the copious and ever-delightful " Records of 
a Girlhood " and " Records of Later Life," which form 
together one of the most animated autobiographies in 
the language. Her poetry, all passionate and melan- 
choly and less prized, I think, than it deserves, is per- 
fectly individual and really lyrical. Much of it is so 
off-hand as to be rough, but much of it has beauty as 
well as reality, such beauty as to make one ask one's 
self (and the question recurs in turning the leaves of 
almost any of her books) whether her aptitude for 
literary expression had not been well worth her treat- 
ing it with more regard. That she might have cared 
for it more is very certain — only as certain, however, 
as it is doubtful if any circumstances could have 
made her care. You can neither take vanity from 
those who have it nor give it to those who have it 
not. She really cared only for things higher and finer 
and fuller and happier than the shabby compromises 
of life, and the polishing of a few verses the more or 
the less would never have given her the illusion of 
the grand style. The matter comes back, moreover, 
to the terrible question of " art "; it is difficult after all 
to see where art can be squeezed in when you have 



108 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

such a quantity of nature. Mrs. Kemble would have 
said that she had all of hers on her hands. A certain 
rude justice presides over our affairs, we have to se- 
lect and to pay, and artists in general are rather spare 
and thrifty folk. They give up for their security a 
great deal that Mrs. Kemble never could give up ; 
security was her dream, but it remained her dream: 
practically she passed her days in peril. What she 
had in verse was not only the lyric impulse but the 
genuine lyric need ; poetry, for her, was one of those 
moral conveniences of which I have spoken and 
which she took where she found them. She made a 
very honest use of it, inasmuch as it expressed for 
her what nothing else could express — the inexpug- 
nable, the fundamental, the boundless and generous 
sadness which lay beneath her vitality, beneath her 
humor, her imagination, her talents, her violence of 
will and integrity of health. This note of suffering, 
audible to the last and pathetic, as the prostrations 
of strength are always pathetic, had an intensity all 
its own, though doubtless, being so direct and unre- 
lieved, the interest and even the surprise of it were 
greatest for those to whom she was personally known. 
There was something even strangely simple in that 
.perpetuity of pain which the finest of her sonnets 
commemorate and which was like the distress of a 
nature conscious of its irremediable exposure and 
consciously paying for it. The great tempest of her 
life, her wholly unprosperous marriage, had created 
waves of feeling which, even after long years, refused 
to be stilled, continued to gather and break. 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE IO9 

Twice only, after her early youth, she tried the sort 
of experiment that is supposed most effectually to 
liberate the mind from the sense of its own troubles 
— the literary imagination of the troubles of others. 
She published, in 1863, the fine, sombre, poetical, but 
unmanageable play called An English Tragedy (writ- 
ten many years previous) ; and at the age of eighty 
she, for the first time, wrote and put forth a short 
novel. The latter of these productions, " Far Away 
and Long Ago," shows none of the feebleness of age ; 
and besides the charm, in form, of its old decorous 
affiliation (one of her friends, on reading it, assured 
her in perfect good faith that she wrote for all the 
world like Walter Scott), it is a twofold example of an 
uncommon felicity. This is, on the one hand, to 
break ground in a new manner and so gracefully at 
so advanced an age (did any one else ever produce a 
first fiction at eighty?), and on the other, to revert 
successfully, in fancy, to associations long outlived. 
Interesting, touching must the book inevitably be, 
from this point of view, to American readers. There 
was nothing finer in Mrs. Kemble's fine mind than 
the generous justice of which she was capable (as her 
knowledge grew, and after the innocent impertinences 
of her girlish " Journal ") to the country in which she 
had, from the first, found troops of friends and inter- 
vals of peace as well as depths of disaster. She had 
a mingled feeling and a sort of conscientious strife 
about it, together with a tendency to handle it as 
gently with one side of her nature as she was prompt- 
ed to belabor it with the other. The United States 



Ifo ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

commended themselves to her liberal opinions as 
much as they disconcerted her intensely conservative 
taste ; she relished every obligation to them but that 
of living in them ; and never heard them eulogized 
without uttering her reserves or abused without 
speaking her admiration. They had been the scene 
of some of her strongest friendships, and, eventually, 
among the mountains of Massachusetts, she had for 
many years, though using it only in desultory ways, 
enjoyed the least occasional of her homes. Late in 
life she looked upon this region as an Arcadia, a 
happy valley, a land of woods and waters and upright 
souls ; and in the light of this tender retrospect, a 
memory of summer days and loved pastimes, of plen- 
tiful riding and fishing, recounted her romantic anec- 
dote, a retarded stroke of the literary clock of 1840. 
An English Tragedy seems to sound from a still ear- 
lier timepiece, has in it an echo of the great Eliza- 
bethans she cherished. 

Compromised by looseness of construction, it has 
nevertheless such beauty and pathos as to make us 
wonder why, with her love of poetry (which she wide- 
ly and perpetually quoted) and her hereditary habit 
of the theatre, she should not oftener have tried her 
strong hand at a play. This reflection is particularly 
suggested by a sallow but robust pamphlet which lies 
before me, with gilt edges and " Seventh Edition " 
stamped in large letters on its cover; an indication 
doubly significant in connection with the words 
" Five shillings and sixpence " (a very archaic price 
for the form) printed at the bottom. " Miss Fanny 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE III 

Kemble's Tragedy," Francis the First, was acted, with 
limited success indeed, in the spring of 1832, and 
afterwards published by Mr. John Murray. She ap- 
peared herself, incongruously, at the age of twenty- 
three, as the queen-mother, Louisa of Savoy (she 
acted indeed often at this time with her father parts 
the most mature) ; and the short life of the play, as a 
performance, does not seem to have impaired the cir- 
culation of the book. Much ventilated in London 
lately has been the question of the publication of 
acted plays ; but even those authors who have hoped 
most for the practice have probably not hoped for 
seventh editions. It was to some purpose that she 
had been heard to describe herself as having been in 
ancient days " a nasty scribbling girl." I know not 
how many editions were attained by The Star of Se- 
ville, her other youthful drama, which I have not en- 
countered. Laxity in the formative direction is, how- 
ever, the weakness that this species of composition 
least brooks. If Mrs. Kemble brushed by, with all 
respect, the preoccupation of " art," it was not with- 
out understanding that the form in question is simply, 
and of necessity, all art, a circumstance that is at 
once its wealth and its poverty. Therefore she for- 
bore to cultivate it ; and as for the spirit's refuge, the 
sovereign remedy of evocation, she found this after 
all in her deep immersion in Shakespeare, the multi- 
tude of whose characters she could so intensely, in 
theatrical parlance, create. 

Any brief account of a character so copious, a life 
so various, is foredoomed to appear to sin by omis- 



112 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

sions ; and any attempt at coherence is purchased 
by simplifications unjust, in the eyes of observers, 
according to the phase or the period with which 
such observers happen to have been in contact. 
If, as an injustice less positive than some others, 
we dwell, in speaking to unacquainted readers, on 
Mrs. Kemble's " professional " career, we seem to 
leave in the shade the other, the personal interest 
that she had for an immense and a constantly re- 
newed circle and a whole later generation. If we 
hesitate to sacrifice the testimony offered by her 
writings to the vivacity of her presence in the world, 
we are (besides taking a tone that she never her- 
self took) in danger of allotting a minor place to 
that social charm and more immediate empire which 
might have been held in themselves to confer emi- 
nence and lift the individual reputation into the 
type. These certainly were qualities of the private 
order; but originality is a question of degree, and 
the higher degrees carry away one sort of barrier as 
well as another. It is vain to talk of Mrs. Kemble 
at all, if we are to lack assurance in saying, for 
those who had not the privilege of knowing her as 
well as for those who had, that she was one of 
the rarest of women. To insist upon her accom- 
plishments is to do injustice to that human large- 
ness which was the greatest of them all, the one by 
which those who admired her most knew her best. 
One of the forms, for instance, taken by the loy- 
alty she so abundantly inspired was an ineradicable 
faith in her being one of the first and most origi- 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE II3 

nal of talkers. To that the remembering listener 
returns as on the whole, in our bridled race, the 
fullest measure and the brightest proof. Her talk 
was everything, everything that she was, or that 
her interlocutor could happen to want ; though, in- 
deed, it was often something that he couldn't pos- 
sibly have happened to expect. It was herself, in 
a word, and everything else at the same time. It 
may well have never been better than, with so long 
a past to flow into it, during the greater part of 
the last twenty years of her life. So at least is will- 
ing to believe the author of these scanted reminis- 
cences, whose memory carries him back to Rome, 
the ancient, the adored, and to his first nearer vi- 
sion of the celebrated lady, still retaining in aspect 
so much that had made her admirably handsome 
(including the marked splendor of apparel), as she 
rolled, in the golden sunshine, always alone in her 
high carriage, through Borghese villas and round 
Pincian hills. This expression had, after a short 
interval, a long sequel in the quiet final London 
time, the time during which she willingly ceased to 
wander and indulged in excursions only of memory 
and of wit. 

These years of rest were years of anecdote and 
eloquence and commentary, and of a wonderful many- 
hued retrospective lucidity. Her talk reflected a 
thousand vanished and present things ; but there 
were those of her friends for whom its value was, 
as I have hinted, almost before any other documen- 
tary. The generations move so fast and change so 



114 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

much that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than 
she affected to do, which was much, to antique man- 
ners and a closed chapter of history. Her conver- 
sation swarmed with people and with criticism of 
people, with the ghosts of a dead society. She 
had, in two hemispheres, seen every one and known 
every one, had assisted at the social comedy of her 
age. Her own habits and traditions were in them- 
selves a survival of an era less democratic and more 
mannered. I have no room for enumerations, which 
moreover would be invidious ; but the old London 
of her talk — the direction I liked it best to take — 
was in particular a gallery of portraits. She made 
Count d'Orsay familiar, she made Charles Greville 
present ; I thought it wonderful that she could be 
anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated 
the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, re- 
tuned the old pianos. The finest comedy of all, 
perhaps, was that of her own generous whimsicali- 
ties. She was superbly willing to amuse, and on 
any terms , and her temper could do it as well as her 
wit. If either of these had failed, her eccentricities 
were always there. She had, indeed, so much finer 
a sense of comedy than any one else that she her- 
self knew best, as well as recked least, how she 
might exhilarate. I remember that at the play she 
often said, "Yes, they're funny; but they don't be- 
gin to know how funny they might be !" Mrs. Kem- 
ble always knew, and ■ her good-humor effectually 
forearmed her. She had more "habits" than most 
people have room in life for, and a theory that to a 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 115 

person of her disposition they were as necessary as 
the close meshes of a strait-waistcoat. If she had 
not lived by rule (on her showing), she would have 
lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her 
reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant 
theory and all her extravagant practice, her drol- 
lery that mocked at her melancholy, her imagina- 
tion that mocked at her drollery, and her rare forms 
and personal traditions that mocked a little at every- 
thing — these were part of the constant freshness 
which made those who loved her love her so much. 
" If my servants can live with me a week they can 
live with me forever," she often said ; " but the first 
week sometimes kills them." I know not what 
friends it may also have killed, but very fully how 
many it spared ; and what dependants, what devo- 
tees, what faithful and humble affections clung to 
her to the end and after. A domestic who had 
been long in her service quitted his foreign home 
the instant he heard of her death, and, travelling 
for thirty hours, arrived travel-stained and breathless, 
like a messenger in a romantic tale, just in time to 
drop a handful of flowers into her grave. 

The Alpine guides loved her — she knew them all, 
and those for whom her name offered difficulties 
identified her charmingly as " la dame qui va chantant 
par les montagnes" She had sung, over hill and 
dale, all her days (music was in her blood) ; but 
those who had not been with her in Switzerland 
while she was still alert never knew what admira- 
ble nonsense she could talk, nor with what original- 



Il6 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

ity and gayety she could invite the spirit of mirth, 
flinging herself, in the joy of high places, on the 
pianos of mountain inns, joking, punning, botaniz- 
ing, encouraging the lowly and abasing the proud, 
making stupidity everywhere gape (that was almost 
her mission in life), and startling infallibly all prim- 
ness of propriety. Punctually on the first of June, 
every year, she went to Switzerland ; punctually on 
the first of September she came back. During the 
interval she roamed as far and as high as she could ; 
for years she walked and climbed, and when she 
could no longer climb she rode. When she could 
no longer ride she was carried, and when her health 
ceased to permit the chaise-a-porteurs it was as if the 
great warning had come. Then she moved and 
mounted only with wistful, with absolutely tearful 
eyes, sitting for hours on the balconies of high- 
perched hotels, and gazing away at her paradise 
lost. She yielded the ground only inch by inch, 
but towards the end she had to accept the valleys 
almost altogether and to decline upon paltry com- 
promises and Italian lakes. Nothing was more touch- 
ing at the last than to see her caged at Stresa or at 
Orta, still slowly circling round her mountains, but 
not trusting herself to speak of them. I remember 
well the melancholy of her silence during a long 
and lovely summer drive, after the turn of the tide, 
from one of the places just mentioned to the other; 
it was so little what she wanted to be doing. When, 
three years before her death, she had to recognize 
that her last pilgrimage had been performed, this 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 117 

was the knell indeed; not the warning of the end, 
but the welcome and inexorable term. Those, how- 
ever, with whom her name abides will see her as 
she was during the previous years — a personal force 
so large and sound that it was, in fact, no merely- 
simple satisfaction to be aware of such an abun- 
dance of being on the part of one whose innermost 
feeling was not the love of life. To such uneasy 
observers, seeking for the truth of personal histories 
and groping for definitions, it revealed itself as im- 
pressive that she had never, at any moment from 
the first, been in spirit reconciled to existence. She 
had done what her conditions permitted to become 
so, but the want of adjustment, cover it up as she 
might with will or wit, with passions or talents, with 
laughter or tears, was a quarrel too deep for any 
particular conditions to have made right. To know 
her well was to ask one's self what conditions could 
have fallen in with such an unappeasable sense — I 
know not what to call it, such arrogance of imagi- 
nation. She was more conscious of this infirmity 
than those who might most have suffered from it 
could ever be, and all her generosities and sociabili- 
ties, all her mingled insistence and indifference were, 
as regards others, a magnificently liberal penance 
for it. Nothing indeed could exceed the tenderness 
of her conscience and the humility of her pride. 
But the contempt for conditions and circumstances, 
the grandeur preconceived, were essentially there ; 
she was, in the ancient sense of the word, indom- 
itably, incorruptibly superb. The greatest pride of 



Il8 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

all is to be proud of nothing, the pride not of pre- 
tension but of renunciation ; and this was of course 
her particular kind. I remember her saying once, 
in relation to the difficulty of being pleased, that 
nature had so formed her that she was ever more 
aware of the one fault something beautiful might 
have than of all the beauties that made it what it 
was. The beauty of life at best has a thousand 
faults ; this was therefore still more the case with 
that of a career in the course of which two resound- 
ing false notes had ministered to her characteristic 
irony. She detested the stage, to which she had 
been dedicated while she was too young to judge, 
and she had failed conspicuously to achieve happi- 
ness or tranquillity in marriage. These were the 
principal among many influences that made that 
irony defensive. It was exclusively defensive, but 
it was the first thing that her interlocutors had to 
meet. To a lady who had been brought, wonder- 
ingly, to call upon her, and who the next day caused 
inquiry to be made whether she had not during the 
visit dropped a purse in the house, she requested 
answer to be returned that she was sorry her lady- 
ship had had to pay so much more to see her than 
had formerly been the case. To a very loquacious 
actress who, coming to " consult " her, expatiated 
on all the parts she desired to play, beginning with 
Juliet, the formidable authority, after much patience, 
replied, " Surely the part most marked out for you 
is that of Juliet's nurse !" 

But it was not these frank humors that most dis- 



FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE 119 

tinguished her, nor those legendary brusqueries into 
which her flashing quickness caused her to explode 
under visitations of dulness and density, which, to 
save the situation, so often made her invent, for 
arrested interlocutors, retorts at her own expense 
to her own sallies, and which, in her stall at the thea- 
tre, when comedy was helpless and heavy, scarcely 
permitted her (while she instinctively and urgingly 
clapped her hands to a faster time) to sit still for 
the pity of it ; it was her fine, anxious humanity, the 
generosity of her sympathies, and the grand line and 
mass of her personality. This elevation no small- 
ness, no vanity, no tortuosity nor selfish precaution 
defaced, and with such and other vulgarities it had 
neither common idiom nor possible intercourse. Her 
faults themselves were only noble, and if I have vent- 
ured to allude to one of the greatest of them, this 
is merely because it was, in its conscious survival, 
the quality in her nature which arouses most tender- 
ness of remembrance. After an occasion, in 1885, 
when such an allusion had been made in her own 
presence, she sent the speaker a touching, a reveal- 
ing sonnet, which, as it has not been published, I 
take the liberty of transcribing : 

" Love, joy and hope, honor and happiness, 
And all that life could precious count beside, 
Together sank into one dire abyss. 
Think you there was too much of any pride 
To fill so deep a pit, a gap so wide, 
Sorrow of such a dismal wreck to hide, 
And shame of such a bankruptcy's excess ? 



120 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Oh, friend of many lonely hours, forbear 
The sole support of such a weight to chide ! 
It helps me all men's pity to abide, 
Less beggar'd than I am still to appear, 
An aspect of some steadfastness to wear, 
Nor yet how often it has bent confess 
Beneath the burden of my wretchedness !" 

It is not this last note, however, that any last 
word about her must sound. Her image is com- 
posed also of too many fairer and happier things, 
and in particular of two groups of endowment, 
rarely found together, either of which would have 
made her interesting and remarkable. The beauty 
of her deep and serious character was extraordi- 
narily brightened and colored by that of her numer- 
ous gifts, and remains splendidly lighted by the 
memory of the most resonant and most personal 
of them all. 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 

In the year 1877 Gustave Flaubert wrote to a 
friend : " You speak of Balzac's letters. I read 
them when they appeared, but with very little en- 
thusiasm. The man gains from them, but not the 
artist. He was too much taken up with business. 
You never meet a general idea, a sign of his car- 
ing for anything beyond his material interests. . . . 
What a lamentable life !" At the time the volumes 
appeared (the year before) he had written to Ed- 
mond de Goncourt : " What a preoccupation with 
money and how little love of art ! Have you noticed 
that he never once speaks of it ? He strove for glo- 
ry, but not for beauty." 

The reader of Flaubert's own correspondence,* 
lately given to the world by his niece, Madame Com- 
manville, and which, in the fourth volume, is brought 
to the eve of his death — the student of so much 
vivid and violent testimony to an intensely exclusive 
passion is moved to quote these words for the sake 
of contrast. It will not be said of the writer that he 
himself never once speaks of art ; it will be said of 

* " Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert." Quatrieme Serie. 
Paris, 1893 



122 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

him with a near approach to truth that he almost 
never once speaks of anything else. The effect of 
contrast is indeed strong everywhere in this singular 
publication, from which Flaubert's memory receives 
an assault likely to deepen the air of felicity missed 
that would seem destined henceforth to hang over his 
personal life. "May I be skinned alive," he writes 
in 1854, "before I ever turn my private feelings to 
literary account." His constant refrain in his letters 
is the impersonality, as he calls it, of the artist, whose 
work should consist exclusively of his subject and his 
style, without an emotion, an idiosyncrasy that is not 
utterly transmuted. Quotation does but scanty jus- 
tice to his rage for this idea ; almost all his feelings 
were such a rage that we wonder what form they 
would have borrowed from a prevision of such post- 
humous betrayal. " It's one of my principles that 
one must never write down one's self. The artist 
must be present in his work like God in creation, 
invisible and almighty, everywhere felt, but nowhere 
seen." Such was the part he allotted to form, to 
that rounded detachment which enables the perfect 
work to live by its own life, that he regarded as 
indecent and dishonorable the production of any im- 
pression that was not intensely calculated. " Feel- 
ings " were necessarily crude, because they were in- 
evitably unselected, and selection (for the picture's 
sake) was Flaubert's highest morality. 

This principle has been absent from the counsels 
of the editor of his letters, which have been given 
to the world, so far as they were procurable, without 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 123 

attenuation and without scruple. There are many, of 
course, that circumstances have rendered inaccessi- 
ble, but in spite of visible gaps the revelation is full 
enough and remarkable enough. These communica- 
tions would, of course, not have been matter for Flau- 
bert's highest literary conscience ; but the fact re- 
mains that in our merciless age ineluctable fate has 
overtaken the man in the world whom we most imagine 
gnashing his teeth under it. His ideal of dignity, of 
honor and renown, was that nothing should be known 
of him but that he had been an impeccable writer. 
" I feel all the same," he wrote in 1852, "that I shall 
not die before I've set a-roaring somewhere {sans 
avoir fait rugir quelque part) such a style as hums 
in my head, and which may very well overpower the 
sound of the parrots and grasshoppers." This is a 
grievous accident for one who could write that " the 
worship of art contributes to pride, and of pride one 
has never too much." Sedentary, cloistered, passion- 
ate, cynical, tormented in his love of magnificent ex- 
pression, of subjects remote and arduous, with an 
unattainable ideal, he kept clear all his life of vul- 
garity and publicity and newspaperism only to be 
dragged after death into the middle of the market- 
place, where the electric light beats fiercest. Ma- 
dame Commanville's publication hands him over to 
the Philistines with every weakness exposed, every 
mystery dispelled, every secret betrayed. Almost 
the whole of her second volume, to say nothing of 
a large part of her first, consists of his love-letters 
to the only woman he appears to have addressed in 



124 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the accents of passion. His private style, moreover, 
was as unchastened as his final form was faultless. 
The result happens to be deeply interesting to the 
student of the famous "artistic temperament"; it 
can scarcely be so for a reader less predisposed, I 
think, for Flaubert was a writers' writer as much as 
Shelley was a " poets' poet " ; but we may ask our- 
selves if the time has not come when it may well 
cease to be a leading feature of our homage to a dis- 
tinguished man that we shall sacrifice him with san- 
guinary rites on the altar of our curiosity. Flaubert's 
letters, indeed, bring up with singular intensity the 
whole question of the rights and duties, the decen- 
cies and discretions of the insurmountable desire to 
know. To lay down a general code is perhaps as yet 
impossible, for there is no doubt that to know is good, 
or to want to know, at any rate, supremely natural. 
Some day or other surely we shall all agree that ev- 
erything is relative, that facts themselves are often 
falsifying, and that we pay more for some kinds of 
knowledge than those particular kinds are worth. 
Then we shall perhaps be sorry to have had it 
drummed into us that the author of calm, firm mas- 
terpieces, of "Madame Bovary," of " Salammbo," of 
" Saint- Julien l'Hospitalier," was narrow and noisy, 
and had not personally and morally, as it were, the 
great dignity of his literary ideal. 

When such revelations are made, however, they 
are made, and the generous attitude is doubtless at 
that stage to catch them in sensitive hands. Poor 
Flaubert has been turned inside out for the lesson, 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT I 25 

but it has been given to him to constitute practically 
— on the demonstrator's table with an attentive cir- 
cle round — an extraordinary, a magnificent "case." 
Never certainly in literature was the distinctively lit- 
erary idea, the fury of execution, more passionately 
and visibly manifested. This rare visibility is prob- 
ably the excuse that the responsible hand will point 
to. The letters enable us to note it, to follow it from 
phase to phase, from one wild attitude to another, 
through all the contortions and objurgations, all the 
exaltations and despairs, tensions and collapses, the 
mingled pieties and profanities of Flaubert's simpli- 
fied yet intemperate life. Their great interest is that 
they exhibit an extraordinary singleness of aim, show 
us the artist not only disinterested, but absolutely 
dishumanized. They help us to perceive what Flau- 
bert missed almost more than what he gained, and if 
there are many questions in regard to such a point of 
view that they certainly fail to settle, they at least 
cause us to turn them over as we have seldom turned 
them before. It was the lifelong discomfort of this 
particular fanatic, but it is our own extreme advan- 
tage, that he was almost insanely excessive. " In 
literature," he wrote in 1861, "the best chance one 
has is by following out one's temperament and exag- 
gerating it." His own he could scarcely exaggerate ; 
but it carried him so far that we seem to see on dis- 
tant heights his agitations outlined against the sky. 
" Impersonal " as he wished his work to be, it was 
his strange fortune to be the most expressive, the 
most vociferous, the most spontaneous of men. The 



126 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

record of his temperament is therefore complete, and 
if his ambiguities make the illuminating word diffi- 
cult to utter, it is not because the picture is colorless. 
Why was such a passion, in proportion to its 
strength, after all so sterile ? There is life, there is 
blood in a considerable measure in "Madame Bova- 
ry," but the last word about its successors can only 
be, it seems to me, that they are splendidly and infi- 
nitely curious. Why may, why must, indeed, in cer- 
tain cases, the effort of expression spend itself, and 
spend itself in success, without completing the circle, 
without coming round again to the joy of evocation ? 
How can art be so genuine and yet so unconsoled, 
so unhumorous, so unsociable ? When it is a relig- 
ion, and therefore an authority, why should it not be, 
like other authorities, a guarantee ? How can it be 
such a curse without being also a blessing? What 
germ of treachery lurks in it to make it, not necessar- 
ily, but so easily that there is but a hair-line to cross, 
delusive for personal happiness ? Why, in short, 
when the struggle is success, should the success not 
be at last serenity? These mysteries and many 
others pass before us as we listen to Flaubert's loud 
plaint, which is precisely the profit we derive from 
his not having, with his correspondents, struck, like 
Balzac, only the commercial note. Nothing in his 
agitated and limited life, which began at Rouen in 
182 1, is more striking than the prompt, straightfor- 
ward way his destiny picked him out and his con- 
science handed him over. As most young men have 
to contend with some domestic disapproval of the 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 1 27 

muse, so this one had rather to hang back on the 
easy incline and to turn away his face from the for- 
midable omens. It was only too evident that he 
would be free to break his heart, to gueuler, as he 
fondly calls it, to spout, to mouth and thresh about, 
to that heart's content. No career was ever more 
taken for granted in its intensity, nor any series of 
tribulations more confidently invited. It was recog- 
nized from the first that the tall and splendid youth, 
green-eyed and sonorous (his stature and aspect were 
distinguished), was born to gueuler, and especially his 
own large cadences. 

His father, a distinguished surgeon, who died early, 
had purchased near Rouen, on the Seine, the small 
but picturesque property of Croisset ; and it was in 
a large five-windowed corner room of this quiet old 
house, his study for forty years, that his life was virt- 
ually spent. It was marked by two great events : 
his journey to the East and return through the south 
of Europe with Maxime du Camp in 1849, and the 
publication of " Madame Bovary " (followed by a 
train of consequences) in 1857. He made a second 
long journey (to Algeria, Tunis, and the site of Car- 
thage) while engaged in writing " Salammbo " ; he 
had before his father's death taken part in a scant- 
ed family pilgrimage to the north of Italy, and he ap- 
pears once to have spent a few weeks on the Righi, 
and at another time a few days in London, an epi- 
sode, oddly enough, of which there is but the faintest, 
scarcely a recognizable echo in his correspondence. 
For the rest, and save for an occasional interlarding: 



128 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

of Paris, his years were spent at his patient table in 
the room by the rural Seine. If success in life (and 
it is the definition open perhaps to fewest objections) 
consists of achieving in maturity the dreams of one's 
prime, Flaubert's measure may be said to have been 
full. M. Maxime du Camp, in those two curious 
volumes of " Impressions Litteraires," which in 1882 
treated a surprised world and a scandalized circle to 
the physiological explanation of his old friend's idio- 
syncrasies, declares that exactly as that friend was 
with intensity at the beginning, so was he with inten- 
sity in the middle and at the end, and that no life 
was ever simpler or straighter in the sense of being a 
case of growth without change. Doubtful, indeed, 
were the urgency of M. du Camp's revelation and 
the apparent validity of his evidence ; but whether 
or no Flaubert was an epileptic subject, and whether 
or no there was danger in our unconsciousness of 
the question (danger to any one but M. Maxime du 
Camp), the impression of the reader of the letters is 
in complete conformity with the pronouncement to 
which I allude. The Flaubert of fifty differs from 
the Flaubert of twenty only in size. The difference 
between " Bouvard et Pecuchet " and " Madame Bo- 
vary " is not a difference of spirit ; and it is a proof 
of the author's essential continuity that his first pub- 
lished work, appearing when he had touched middle 
life and on which his reputation mainly rests, had 
been planned as long in advance as if it had been a 
new religion. 

" Madame Bovary " was five years in the writing, 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 



I29 



and the " Tentation de Saint-Antoine," which saw the 
light in 1874, but the consummation of an idea enter- 
tained in his boyhood. " Bouvard et Pecuchet," the 
intended epos of the blatancy, the comprehensive 
ffitise, of mankind, was in like manner the working- 
out at the end of his days of his earliest generaliza- 
tion. It had literally been his life-long dream to 
crown his career with a panorama of human inep- 
titude. Everything in his literary life had been 
planned and plotted and prepared. One moves in 
it through an atmosphere of the darkest, though the 
most innocent, conspiracy. He was perpetually lay- 
ing a train, a train of which the inflammable sub- 
stance was " style." His great originality was that 
the long siege of his youth was successful, I can 
recall no second case in which poetic justice has in- 
terfered so gracefully. He began " Madame Bovary " 
from afar off, not as an amusement or a profit or a 
clever novel or even a work of art or a morceau de vie, 
as his successors say to-day, not even, either, as the 
best thing he could make it ; but as a premeditated 
classic, a masterpiece pure and simple, a thing of con- 
scious perfection and a contribution of the first mag- 
nitude to the literature of his country. There would 
have been every congruity in his encountering pro- 
portionate failure and the full face of that irony in 
things of which he was so inveterate a student. A 
writer of tales who should have taken the extrava- 
gance of his design for the subject of a sad "novel- 
ette " could never have permitted himself any termi- 
nation of such a story but an effective anticlimax. 

9 



130 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

The masterpiece at the end of years would inevitably 
fall very flat and the overweening spirit be left some- 
how to its illusions. The solution, in fact, was very 
different, and as Flaubert had deliberately sown, so 
exactly and magnificently did he reap. The perfec- 
tion of " Madame Bovary " is one of the common- 
places of criticism, the position of it one of the high- 
est a man of letters dare dream of, the possession of 
it one of the glories of France. No calculation was 
ever better fulfilled, nor any train more successfully 
laid. It is a sign of the indefeasible bitterness to 
which Flaubert's temperament condemned him and 
the expression of which, so oddly, is yet as obstrep- 
erous and boyish as that of the happiness arising from 
animal spirits — it is a mark of his amusing pessimism 
that so honorable a first step should not have done 
more to reconcile him to life. But he was a creature 
of transcendent dreams and unfathomable perversi- 
ties of taste, and it was in his nature to be more con- 
scious of one broken spring in the couch of fame, 
more wounded by a pin-prick, more worried by an 
assonance, than he could ever be warmed or pacified 
from within. Literature and life were a single busi- 
ness to him, and the " torment of style," that might 
occasionally intermit in one place, was sufficiently sure 
to break out in another. We may polish our periods 
till they shine again, but over the style of life our con- 
trol is necessarily more limited. 

To such limitations Flaubert resigned himself with 
the worst possible grace. He polished ferociously, 
but there was a side of the matter that his process 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 131 

could never touch. Some other process might have 
been of use ; some patience more organized, some 
formula more elastic, or simply perhaps some hap- 
pier trick of good-humor ; at the same time it must 
be admitted that in his deepening vision of the imbe- 
cility of the world any remedy would have deprived 
him of his prime, or rather of his sole, amusement. 
The betisc of mankind was a colossal comedy, calling 
aloud to heaven for an Aristophanes to match, and 
Flaubert's nearest approach to joy was in noting the 
opportunities of such an observer and feeling within 
himself the stirrings of such a genius Towards the 
end he found himself vibrating at every turn to this 
ideal, and if he knew to the full the tribulation of 
proper speech no one ever suffered less from that of 
proper silence. He broke it in his letters, on a thou- 
sand queer occasions, with all the luxury of relief. 
He was blessed with a series of correspondents with 
whom he was free to leave nothing unsaid ; many of 
them ladies, too, so that he had in their company all 
the inspiration of gallantry without its incidental sac- 
rifices. The most interesting of his letters are those 
addressed between 1866 and 1876 to Madame George 
Sand, which, originally collected in 1884, have been 
re-embodied in Madame Commanville's publication. 
They are more interesting than ever when read, as we 
are now able to read them, in connection with Ma- 
dame Sand's equally personal and much more lumi- 
nous answers, accessible in the fifth and sixth volumes 
of her own copious and strikingly honorable " Corre- 
spondance." No opposition could have been more of 



132 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

a nature to keep the ball rolling than that of the par- 
ties to this candid commerce, who were as united by- 
affection and by common interests as they were di- 
vided by temper and their way of feeling about those 
interests. Living, each of them, for literature (though 
Madame Sand, in spite of her immense production, 
very much less exclusively for it than her indepen- 
dent and fastidious friend), their comparison of most 
of the impressions connected with it could yet only 
be a lively contrast of temperaments. Flaubert, whose 
bark indeed (it is the rule) was much worse than his 
bite, spent his life, especially the later part of it, in a 
state of acute exasperation ; but her unalterable se- 
renity was one of the few initants that were tolerable 
to him. 

Their letters are a striking lesson in the difference 
between good humor and bad, and seem to point the 
moral that either form has only to be cultivated to 
become our particular kind of intelligence. They 
compared conditions, at any rate,'" her expansion with 
his hard contraction, and he had the advantage of 
finding in a person who had sought wisdom in ways 
so many and so devious one of the few objects with- 
in his ken that really represented virtue and that he 
could respect It gives us the pattern of his experi- 
ence that Madame Sand should have stood to him for 
so much of the ideal, and we may say this even under 
the impression produced by a reperusal of her total 
correspondence, a monument to her generosity and 
variety. Poor Flaubert appears to us to-day almost 
exactly by so much less frustrated as he was beguiled 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 133 

by this happy relation, the largest he ever knew. His 
interlocutress, who in the evening of an arduous life 
accepted refreshment wherever she found it and who 
could still give as freely as she took, for immemorial 
habit had only added to each faculty, his correspond- 
ent, for all her love of well-earned peace, offered 
her breast to his aggressive pessimism ; had motherly, 
reasoning, coaxing hands for it; made, in short, such 
sacrifices that she often came to Paris to go to brawl- 
ing Magny dinners to meet him and wear, to please 
him, as I have heard one of the diners say, unaccus- 
tomed peach-blossom dresses. It contributes to our 
sense of what there was lovable at the core of his ef- 
fort to select and his need to execrate that he should 
have been able to read and enjoy so freely a writer so 
fluid ; and it also reminds us that imagination is, after 
all, for the heart, the safest quality. Flaubert had excel- 
lent honest inconsistencies, crude lapses from purity in 
which he could like the books of his friends. He was 
susceptible of painless amusement (a rare emotion with 
him) when his imagination was touched, as it was in- 
fallibly and powerfully, by affection. To make a hard 
rule never to be corrupted, and then to make a special 
exception for fondness, is of course- the right attitude. 
He had several admirations, and it might always 
be said of him that he would have admired if he 
could, for he could like a thing if he could be proud 
of it, and the act adapted itself to his love of magnifi- 
cence. He could like, indeed, almost any one he could 
say great colored things about : the ancients, almost 
promiscuously, for they never wrote in newspapers, and 



134 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Shakespeare (of whom he could not say fine things 
enough) and Rabelais and Montaigne and Goethe and 
Victor Hugo (his biggest modern enthusiasm) and Le- 
conte de Lisle and Renan and Theophile Gautier. He 
did scant justice to Balzac and even less to Alfred de 
Musset. On the other hand, he had an odd and inter- 
esting indulgence for Boileau. Balzac and Musset 
were not, by his measure, " writers," and he maintains 
that, be it in verse, be it in prose, it is only so far as 
they "write " that authors live ; between the two cate- 
gories he makes a fundamental distinction. The lat- 
ter, indeed, the mere authors, simply did not exist for 
him, and with Mr. Besant's Incorporated Society he 
would have had nothing whatever to do. He declares 
somewhere that it is only the writer who survives in the 
poet. In spite of his patience with the " muse " to whom 
the majority of the letters in the earlier of the volumes 
before us were addressed, and of the great invidious 
coup de chapeau with which he could here and there 
render homage to versification, his relish for poetry as 
poetry was moderate. Far higher was his estimate of 
prose as prose, which he held to be much the more dif- 
ficult art of the two, with more maddening problems 
and subtler rhythms, and on whose behalf he found 
it difficult to forgive the " proud-sister " attitude of 
verse. No man at any rate, to make up for scanty pref- 
erences, can have had a larger list of literary aversions. 
His eye swept the field in vain for specimens untaint- 
ed with the " modern infection," the plague which had 
killed Theophile Gautier and to which he considered 
that he himself had already succumbed. If he glanced 



GUST AVE FLAUBERT 135 

at ■A.feuilleton he saw that Madame Sarah Bernhardt 
was " a social expression," and his resentment of this 
easy wisdom resounded disproportionately through all 
the air he lived in. One has always a kindness for 
people who detest the contemporary tone if they have 
done something fine ; but the baffling thing in Flau- 
bert was the extent of his suffering and the inelas- 
ticity of his humor. The jargon of the newspapers, 
the slovenliness of the novelists, the fatuity of Octave 
Feuillet, to whom he was exceedingly unjust, for that 
writer's love of magnificence was not inferior to his 
critic's, all work upon him with an intensity only to 
be explained by the primary defect of his mind, his 
want of a general sense of proportion. That sense 
stopped apparently when he had settled the relation 
of the parts of a phrase, as to which it was exquisite. 

Fortunately he had confidants to whom he could 
cry out when he was hurt, and whose position, as he 
took life for the most part as men take a violent 
toothache, was assuredly no sinecure. To more than 
one intense friendship were his younger and middle 
years devoted ; so close was his union with Louis 
Bouilhet, the poet and dramatist, that he could say in 
1870 : " I feel no longer the need to write, because I 
wrote especially for a being who is no more. There's 
no taste in it now — the impulse has gone." As he 
wrote for Bouilhet, so Bouilhet wrote for him. " There 
are so few people who like what I like or have an 
idea of what I care for." That was the indispensable 
thing for him in a social, a personal relation, the ex- 
istence in another mind of a love of literature suffi- 



136 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

ciently demonstrated to relieve the individual from 
the great and damning charge, the charge perpetually 
on Flaubert's lips in regard to his contemporaries, 
the accusation of malignantly hating it. This univer- 
sal conspiracy he perceived, in his own country, in 
every feature of manners, and to a degree which may 
well make us wonder how high he would have piled 
the indictment if he had extended the inquiry to the 
manners of ours. We draw a breath of relief when 
we think to what speedier suffocation he would have 
yielded had he been materially acquainted with the 
great English-speaking peoples. When he declared, 
naturally enough, that liking what he liked was a con- 
dition of intercourse, his vision of this community 
was almost destined, in the nature of things, to re- 
main unachievable ; for it may really be said that no 
one in the world ever liked anything so much as Flau- 
bert liked beauty of style. The mortal indifference 
to it of empires and republics was the essence of 
that " modern infection " from which the only escape 
would have been to tie /aire que de fart. Mankind, 
for him, was made up of the three or four persons, 
Ivan Turgenieff in the number, who perceived what 
he was trying for, and of the innumerable millions 
who didn't. Poor M. Maxime du Camp, in spite of 
many of the leading characteristics of a friend, was 
one of this multitude, and he pays terribly in the 
pages before us for his position. He pays, to my 
sense, excessively, for surely he had paid enough 
and exactly in the just and appropriate measure, 
when, in the introduction contributed to the " defini- 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 137 

tive " edition of " Madame Bovary," M. Guy de Mau- 
passant, avenging his master by an exquisite stroke, 
made public the letter of advice and remonstrance 
addressed to Flaubert by M. du Camp, then editor 
of the Revue de Paris, on the eve of the serial ap- 
pearance of the former's first novel in that period- 
ical. This incomparable effusion, with its amazing 
reference to excisions, and its suggestion that the 
work be placed in the hands of an expert and inex- 
pensive corrector who will prepare it for publication, 
this priceless gem will twinkle forever in the setting 
M. de Maupassant has given it, or we may, perhaps, 
still more figuratively say in the forehead of the mas- 
terpiece it discusses. But there was surely a need- 
less, there was surely a nervous and individual feroc- 
ity in such a vindictive giving to the w r orld of every 
passage of every letter in which the author of that 
masterpiece has occasion to allude to his friend's 
want of tact. It naturally made their friendship 
unsuccessful that Flaubert disliked M. du Camp, 
but it is a monstrous imputation on his character 
to assume that he was small enough never to have 
forgiven and forgotten the other's mistake. Great 
people never should be avenged ; it diminishes their 
privilege. What M. du Camp, so far as an outsider 
may judge, had to be punished for was the tone of 
his reminiscences. But the tone is unmistakably the 
tone of affection. He may have felt but dimly what 
his old comrade was trying for, and even the latent 
richness of " L'Education Sentimentale," but he ren- 
ders full justice to Flaubert's noble independence. 



138 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

The tone of Flaubert's own allusions is a different 
thing altogether. It is not unfair to say that all this 
disproportionate tit-for-tat renders the episode one of 
the ugliest little dramas of recent literary history. 
The irony of a friend's learning after long years and 
through the agency of the press how unsuspectedly 
another friend was in the habit of talking of him, is 
an irony too cruel for impartial minds. The disaster 
is absolute, and our compassion goes straight to the 
survivor. There are other survivors who will have 
but little more reason to think that the decencies 
have presided over such a publication. 

It is only a reader here and there in all the wide 
world who understands to-day, or who ever under- 
stood, what Gustave Flaubert tried for ; and it is only 
when such a reader is also a writer, and a tolera- 
bly tormented one, that he particularly cares. Poor 
Flaubert's great revenge, however, far beyond that of 
any editorial treachery, is that when this occasional 
witness does care he cares very peculiarly and very 
tenderly, and much more than he may be able suc- 
cessfully to say. Then the great irritated style-seeker 
becomes, in the embracing mind, an object of inter- 
est and honor ; not so much for what he altogether 
achieved, as for the way he strove and for the inspir- 
ing image that he presents. There is no reasoning 
about him ; the more we take him as he is the more 
he has a special authority. " Salammbo," in which 
we breathe the air of pure aesthetics, is as hard as 
stone ; " L'Education," for the same reason, is as cold 
as death ; " Saint- Antoine " is a medley of wonderful 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT I 39 

bristling metals and polished agates, and the droll- 
ery of "Bouvard et Pecuchet" (a work as sad as 
something perverse and puerile done for a wager) 
about as contagious as the smile of a keeper showing 
you through the wards of a madhouse. In " Madame 
Bovary " alone emotion is just sufficiently present to 
take off the chill. This truly is a qualified report, 
yet it leaves Flaubert untouched at the points where 
he is most himself, leaves him master of a province 
in which, for many of us, it will never be an idle 
errand to visit him. The way to care for him is to 
test the virtue of his particular exaggeration, to ac- 
cept for the sake of his aesthetic influence the idiosyn- 
crasies now revealed to us, his wild gesticulation, his 
plaintive, childish side, the side as to which one asks 
one's self what has become of ultimate good-humor, of 
human patience, of the enduring man. He pays and 
pays heavily for his development in a single direc- 
tion, for it is probable that no -literary effort so great, 
accompanied with an equal literary talent, ever failed 
on so large a scale to be convincing. It convinces 
only those who are converted, and the number of 
such is very small. It is an appeal so technical that 
we may say of him still, but with more resignation, 
what he personally wailed over, that nobody takes 
his great question seriously. This is indeed why 
there may be for each of the loyal minority a certain 
fine scruple against insistence. If he had had in his 
nature a contradiction the less, if his indifference 
had been more forgiving, this is surely the way in 
which he would have desired most to be preserved. 



140 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

To no one at any rate need it be denied to say 
that the best way to appreciate him is, abstaining 
from the clumsy process of an appeal and the vulgar 
process of an advertisement, exclusively to use him, 
to feel him, to be privately glad of his message. In 
proportion as we swallow him whole and cherish him 
as a perfect example, his weaknesses fall into their 
place as the conditions about which, in estimating a 
man who has been original, there is a want of tact in 
crying out. There is, of course, always the answer 
that the critic is to be suborned only by originalities 
that fertilize ; the rejoinder to which, of equal neces- 
sity, must ever be that even to the critics of unborn 
generations poor Flaubert will doubtless yield a fund 
of amusement. To the end of time there will be 
something flippant, something perhaps even "clever" 
to be said of his immense ado about nothing. Those 
for some of whose moments, on the contrary, this ado 
will be as stirring as music, will belong to the group 
that has dabbled in the same material and striven 
Avith the same striving. The interest he presents, in 
truth, can only be a real interest for fellowship, for 
initiation of the practical kind; and in that case it 
becomes a sentiment, a sort of mystical absorption 
or fruitful secret. The sweetest things in the world 
of art or the life of letters are the irresponsible sym- 
pathies that seem to rest on divination. Flaubert's 
hardness was only the act of holding his breath in 
the reverence of his search for beauty ; his universal 
renunciation, the long spasm of his too-fixed atten- 
tion, was only one of the absurdest sincerities of art. 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 141 

To the participating eye these things are but details 
in the little square picture made at this distance of 
time by his forty years at the battered table at Crois- 
set. Everything lives in this inward vision of the 
wide room on the river, almost the cell of a mono- 
maniac, but consecrated ground to the faithful, which, 
as he tried and tried again, must so often have re- 
sounded with the pomp of a syntax addressed, in his 
code, peremptorily to the ear. If there is something 
tragi-comic in the scene, as of a tenacity in the void 
or a life laid down for grammar, the impression passes 
when we turn from the painful process to the sharp 
and splendid result. Then, since if we like people 
very much we end by liking their circumstances, the 
eternal chamber and the dry Benedictine years have 
a sufficiently palpable offset in the repousse' bronze of 
the books. 

An incorruptible celibate and dkdaigneux des femmes 
(as, in spite of the hundred and forty letters addressed 
to Madame Louise Colet, M. de Maupassant styles 
him and, in writing to Madame Sand, he confesses 
himself), it was his own view of his career that, as art 
was the only thing worth living for, he had made im- 
mense sacrifices to application — sacrificed passions, 
joys, affections, curiosities, and opportunities. He 
says that he shut his passions up in cages, and only 
at long intervals, for amusement, had a look at them. 
The orgie de litterature, in short, had been his sole 
form of excess. He knew best, of course, but his 
imaginations about himself (as about other matters) 
were, however justly, rich, and to the observer at this 



142 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

distance he appears truly to have been made of the 
very stuff of a Benedictine. He compared himself to 
the camel, which can neither be stopped when he is go- 
ing nor moved when he is resting. He was so seden- 
tary, so averse to physical exercise, which he speaks 
of somewhere as an occupation funeste, that his main 
alternative to the chair was, even by day, the bed, 
and so omnivorous in research that the act of com- 
position, with him, was still more impeded by knowl- 
edge than by taste. " I have in me," he writes to 
the imperturbable Madame Sand, "a.fondd'eccle'sias- 
tique that people don't know " — the clerical basis of 
the Catholic clergy. " We shall talk of it," he adds, 
" much better viva voce than by letter " ; and we can 
easily imagine the thoroughness with which between 
the unfettered pair, when opportunity favored, the 
interesting subject was treated. At another time, 
indeed, to the same correspondent, who had given 
him a glimpse of the happiness of being a grand- 
mother, he refers with touching sincerity to the poig- 
nancy of solitude to which the " radical absence of the 
feminine element " in his life had condemned him. 
" Yet I was born with every capacity for tenderness. 
One doesn't shape one's destiny, one undergoes it. 
I was pusillanimous in my youth — I was afraid of 
life. We pay for everything." Besides, it was his 
theory that a "man of style" should never stoop to 
action. If he had been afraid of life in fact, I must 
add, he was preserved from the fear of it in imagina- 
tion by that great " historic start," the sensibility to 
the frisson historigue, which dictates the curious and 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT I 43 

beautiful outburst, addressed to Madame Colet, when 
he asks why it had not been his lot to live in the 
age of Nero. " How I would have talked with the 
Greek rhetors, travelled in the great chariots on the 
Roman roads, and in the evening, in the hostelries, 
turned in with the vagabond priests of Cybele ! . . . 
I have lived, all over, in those directions ; doubtless 
in some prior state of being. I'm sure I've been, 
under the Roman empire, manager of some troop of 
strolling players, one of the rascals who used to go 
to Sicily to buy women to make actresses, and who 
were at once professors, panders, and artists. These 
scoundrels have wonderful ' mugs ' in the comedies 
of Plautus, in reading which I seem to myself to re- 
member things." 

He was an extreme admirer of Apuleius, and his 
florid inexperience helps doubtless somewhat to ex- 
plain those extreme sophistications of taste of which 
"La Tentation de Saint- Antoine " is so elaborate an 
example. Far and strange are the refuges in which 
such an imagination seeks oblivion of the immedi- 
ate and the ugly. His life was that of a pearl-diver, 
breathless in the thick element while he groped for 
the priceless word, and condemned to plunge again 
and again. He passed it in reconstructing sentences, 
exterminating repetitions, calculating and comparing 
cadences, harmonious chutes de phrase, and beating 
about the bush to deal death to the abominable 
assonance. Putting aside the particular ideal of 
style which made a pitfall of the familiar, few men 
surely have ever found it so difficult to deal with 



144 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the members of a phrase. He loathed the smug 
face of facility as much as he suffered from the 
nightmare of toil ; but if he had been marked in 
the cradle for literature it may be said without para- 
dox that this was not on account of any native dis- 
position to write, to write at least as he aspired 
and as he understood the term. He took long years 
to finish his books, and terrible months and weeks 
to deliver himself of his chapters and his pages. 
Nothing could exceed his endeavor to make them 
all rich and round, just as nothing could exceed the 
unetherized anguish in which his successive chil- 
dren were born. His letters, in which, inconse- 
quently for one who had so little faith in any rigor 
of taste or purity of perception save his own, he 
takes everybody into his most intimate literary con- 
fidence, the pages of the publication before us are 
the record of everything that retarded him. The 
abyss of reading answered to the abyss of writing ; 
with the partial exception of "Madame Bovary" 
every subject that he treated required a rising flood 
of information. There are libraries of books behind 
his most innocent sentences. The question of "art" 
for him was so furiously the question of form, and 
the question of form was so intensely the question 
of rhythm, that from the beginning to the end of his 
correspondence we scarcely ever encounter a men- 
tion of any beauty but verbal beauty. He quotes 
Goethe fondly as to the supreme importance of the 
" conception," but the conception remains for him 
essentially the plastic one. 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 145 

There are moments when his restless passion for 
form strikes us as leaving the subject out of account 
altogether, as if he had taken it up arbitrarily, blindly, 
preparing himself the years of misery in which he 
is to denounce the grotesqueness, the insanity of his 
choice. Four times, with his orgueil, his love of 
magnificence, he condemned himself incongruously 
to the modern and familiar, groaning at every step 
over the horrible difficulty of reconciling " style " in 
such cases with truth and dialogue with surface. 
He wanted to do the battle of Thermopylae, and he 
found himself doing " Bouvard et Pecuchet." One of 
the sides by which he interests us, one of the sides 
that will always endear him to the student, is his 
extraordinary ingenuity in lifting without falsifying, 
finding a middle way into grandeur and edging off 
from the literal without forsaking truth. This way 
was open to him from the moment he could look 
down upon his theme from the position of une blague 
sufierieure, as he calls it, the amused freedom of an 
observer as irreverent as a creator. But if subjects 
were made for style (as to which Flaubert had a 
rigid theory : the -idea was good enough if the ex- 
pression was), so style was made for the ear, the last 
court of appeal, the supreme touchstone of perfec- 
tion. He was perpetually demolishing his periods 
in the light of his merciless gueulades. He tried 
them on every one ; his gueulades could make him 
sociable. The horror, in particular, that haunted all 
his years was the horror of the cliche, the stereotyped, 
the thing usually said and the way it was usually 



146 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

said, the current phrase that passed muster. Noth- 
ing, in his view, passed muster but freshness, that 
which came into the world, with all the honors, for 
the occasion. To use the ready-made was as dis- 
graceful as for a self-respecting cook to buy a tinned 
soup or a sauce in a bottle. Flaubert considered 
that the dispenser of such wares was indeed the 
grocer, and, producing his ingredients exclusively at 
home, he would have stabbed himself for shame like 
Vatel. This touches on the strange weakness of his 
mind, his puerile dread of the grocer, the bourgeois, 
the sentiment that in his generation and the pre- 
ceding misplaced, as it were, the spirit of advent- 
ure and the sense of honor, and sterilized a whole 
province of French literature. That worthy citizen 
ought never to have kept a poet from dreaming. 

He had for his delectation and for satiric purposes 
a large collection of those second-hand and approxi- 
mate expressions which begged the whole literary 
question. To light upon a perfect example was his 
nearest approach to natural bliss. " Bouvard et Pe- 
cuchet " is a museum of such examples, the cream 
of that " Dictionnaire des Idees Recues " for which 
all his life he had taken notes and which eventually 
resolved itself into the encyclopaedic exactitude and 
the lugubrious humor of the novel. Just as subjects 
were meant for style, so style was meant for images ; 
therefore as his own were numerous and admirable 
he would have contended, coming back to the source, 
that he was one of the writers to whom the signifi- 
cance of a work had ever been most present. This 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT I 47 

significance was measured by the amount of style 
and the quantity of metaphor thrown up. Poor sub- 
jects threw up a little, fine subjects threw up much, 
and the finish of his prose was the proof of his pro- 
fundity. If you pushed far enough into language 
you found yourself in the embrace of thought. 
There are, doubtless, many persons whom this ac- 
count of the matter will fail to satisfy, and there will 
indeed be no particular zeal to put it forward even 
on the part of those for whom, as a writer, Flaubert 
most vividly exists. He is a strong taste, like any 
other that is strong, and he exists only for those 
who have a constitutional need to feel in some di- 
rection the particular aesthetic confidence that he in- 
spires. That confidence rests on the simple fact 
that he carried execution so far and nailed it so 
fast. No one will care for him at all who does not 
care, for his metaphors, and those moreover who 
care most for these will be discreet enough to ad- 
mit that even a style rich in similes is limited when 
it renders only the visible. The invisible Flaubert 
scarcely touches ; his vocabulary and all his meth- 
ods were unadjusted and alien to it. He could not 
read his French Wordsworth, M. Sully-Prudhomme ; 
he had no faith in the power of the moral to offer 
a surface. He himself offers such a flawless one 
that this hard concretion is success. If he is im- 
possible as a companion he is deeply refreshing as 
a reference ; and all that his reputation asks of you 
is an occasional tap of the knuckle at those firm 
thin plates of gold which constitute the leaves of 



148 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

his books. This passing tribute will yield the best 
results when you have been prompted to it by some 
other prose. 

In other words, with all his want of fiortee, as the 
psychological critics of his own country would say 
of him, poor Flaubert is one of the artists to whom 
an artist will always go back. And if such a pil- 
grim, in the very act of acknowledgment, drops for 
an instant into the tenderness of compassion, it is 
a compassion singularly untainted with patronage or 
with contempt ; full, moreover, of mystifications and 
wonderments, questions unanswered and speculations 
vain. Why was he so unhappy if he was so active ; 
why was he so intolerant if he was so strong ? Why 
should he not have accepted the circumstance that 
M. de Lamartine also wrote as his nature impelled, 
and that M. Louis Enault embraced a convenient 
opportunity to go to the East ? The East, if we listen 
to him, should have been closed to one of these gen- 
tlemen and literature forbidden to the other. Why 
does the inevitable perpetually infuriate him, and 
why does he inveterately resent the ephemeral ? Why 
does he, above all, in his private, in other words his 
continuous epistolary, despair, assault his correspond- 
ents with malodorous comparisons ? The bad smell 
of the age was the main thing he knew it by. Natu- 
rally therefore he found life a chose hideuse. If it was 
his great merit and the thing we hold on to him for 
that the artist and the man were welded together, 
what becomes, in the proof, of a merit that is so little 
illuminating for life ? What becomes of the virtue 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT I 49 

of the beauty that pretends to be worth living for ? 
Why feel, and feel genuinely, so much about " art," 
in order to feel so little about its privilege ? Why 
proclaim it on the one hand the holy of holies, only 
to let your behavior confess it on the other a tem- 
ple open to the winds ? Why be angry that so few 
people care for the real thing, since this aversion of 
the many leaves a luxury of space ? The answer to 
these too numerous questions is the final perception 
that the subject of our observations failed of happi- 
ness, failed of temperance, not through his excesses, 
but absolutely through his barriers. He passed his 
life in strange oblivion of the circumstance that, 
however incumbent it may be on most of us to do 
our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow 
dogmatisms, nothing in the world that any one is 
under the least obligation to like — not even (one 
braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particu- 
lar kind of writing. Particular kinds of writing may 
sometimes, for their producers, have the good -fort- 
une to please ; but these things are windfalls, pure 
luxuries, not resident even in the cleverest of us as 
natural rights. Let Flaubert always be cited as one 
of the devotees and even, when people are fond of 
the word, as one of the martyrs of the plastic idea -, 
but let him be still more considerately preserved 
and more fully presented as one of the most con- 
spicuous of the faithless. For it was not that he 
went too far, it was on the contrary that he stopped 
too short. He hovered forever at the public door, 
in the outer court, the splendor of which very prop- 



150 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

erly beguiled him, and in which he seems still to 
stand as upright as a sentinel and as shapely as a 
statue. But that immobility and even that erectness 
were paid too dear. The shining arms were meant 
to carry further, the other doors were meant to open. 
He should at least have listened at the chamber of 
the soul. This would have floated him on a deeper 
tide ; above all it would have calmed his nerves. 

1893. 



PIERRE LOTI 

A few years ago the author of these remarks re- 
ceived from an observant friend then in Paris (not a 
Frenchman) a letter containing a passage which he 
ventures to transcribe. His correspondent had been 
to see a celebrated actress — the most celebrated ac- 
tress of our time — in a new and successful play. 

' ' She is a wonderful creature, but how a being so intelligent 
as she can so elaborate what has so little moral stuff in it to work 
upon I don't comprehend. The play is hard and sinister and 
horrible without being in the least degree tragic or pathetic ; 
one felt when it was over like an accomplice in some cold-blood- 
ed piece of cruelty. I am moved to give up the French and 
call to my own species to stand from under and let their fate 
overtake them. Such a disproportionate development of the 
external perceptions and such a perversion of the natural feel- 
ings must work its Nemesis in some way." 

These simple lines, on account of their general, 
not of their special application, have come back to 
me in reading over the several volumes of the re- 
markable genius who wears in literature the name of 
Pierre Loti, as well as in refreshing my recollection 
of some of the pages of his contemporaries. An 
achievement in art or in letters grows more interest- 
ing when we begin to perceive its connections ; and, 



152 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

indeed, it may be said that the study of connections 
is the recognized function of intelligent criticism. It 
is a comparatively poor exercise of the attention (for 
the critic always, I mean) to judge a book all by itself, 
even if it happen to be a book as independent, as lit- 
tle the product of a school and a fashion, as "Le 
Mariage de Loti " or " Mon Frere Yves " or " P§- 
cheur d'Islande." Each of these works is interest- 
ing as illustrating the talent and character of the 
author, but they become still more interesting as 
we note their coincidences and relations with other 
works, for then they begin to illustrate other talents 
and other characters as well: the plot thickens, the 
whole spectacle expands. We seem to be studying 
not simply the genius of an individual, but, in a liv- 
ing manifestation, that of a nation or of a conspicu- 
ous group ; the nation or the group becomes a great 
figure operating on a great scale, and the drama of 
its literary production (to speak only of that) a kind 
of world-drama, lighted by the universal sun, with 
Europe and America for the public, and the arena 
of races, the battle-field of their inevitable contrasts 
and competitions, for the stage. Is not the enter- 
tainment, moreover, a particularly good bill, as they 
say at the theatre, when it is a question of the per- 
formances of France ? Will not the connoisseur feel 
much at his ease, in such a case, about the high ca- 
pacity of the actor, settle himself in his stall with 
the comfortable general confidence that he is to listen 
to a professional and not to an amateur ? Whatever 
benefits or injuries that great country may have con- 



PIERRE LOTI 153 

ferred upon mankind, she has certainly rendered 
them the service of being always, according to her 
own expression, Men en scene. She commits herself 
completely and treats us to extreme cases; her cases 
are test-cases, her experiments heroic and conclusive. 
She has educated our observation by the finish of 
her manner, and whether or no she has the best part 
in the play we feel that she has rehearsed best. 

A writer of the ability of Alphonse Daudet, of that 
of Guy de Maupassant, or of that of the brothers De 
Goncourt, can never fail to be interesting by virtue 
of that ability, the successive manifestations of which 
keep our curiosity alive ; but this curiosity is never 
so great as after we have noted, as I think we almost 
inveterately do, that the strongest gift of each of them 
is the strongest gift of all : a remarkable art of ex- 
pressing the life, of picturing the multitudinous, ad- 
venturous experience, of the senses. We recognize 
this accomplishment with immense pleasure as we 
read — a pleasure so great that it is not for some time 
that we make the other observation that inevitably 
follows on its heels. That observation is somewhat to 
this effect: that in comparison the deeper, stranger, 
subtler inward life, the wonderful adventures of the 
soul, are so little pictured that they may almost be 
said not to be pictured at all. We end with an im- 
pression of want of equilibrium and proportion, and 
by asking ourselves (so coercive are the results of 
comparative criticism) whether such a sacrifice be 
quite obligatory. The value of the few words in the 
letter I just cited is simply that they offer a fresh, 



1 54 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

direct, almost startled measure of the intensity of 
the sacrifice, accompanied with the conviction that 
it must sooner or later be paid for, like every other 
extravagance, and that if the payment be on the scale 
of the aberration it will make an eddy of which those 
who are wise in time should keep clear. This pro- 
fuse development of the external perceptions — those 
of the appearance, the sound, the taste, the material 
presence and pressure of things, will at any rate, I 
think, not be denied to be the master-sign of the 
novel in France as the first among the younger tal- 
ents show it to us to-day. They carry into the whole 
business of looking, seeing, hearing, smelling, into all 
kinds of tactile sensibility and into noting, analyzing, 
and expressing the results of these acts, a serious- 
ness much greater than that of any other people. 
Their tactile sensibility is immense, and it may be 
said in truth to have produced a literature. They 
are so strong on this side that they seem to me to be 
easily masters, and I cannot imagine that their su- 
premacy should candidly be contested. 

An acute sense of aspect and appearance is not 
common, for the only sense that most people have is 
of the particular matter with which, on any occasion, 
their business, their interest or subsistence is bound 
up; but it is less uncommon in some societies than 
in others, and it flourishes conspicuously in France. 
Such is the witness borne by the very vocabulary of 
the people, which abounds in words and idioms ex- 
pressing shades and variations of the visible. I once 
in Paris, at a cafe, heard a gentleman at a table next 



PIERRE LOTI 155 

to my own say to a companion, speaking of a lady 
who had just entered the establishment, " A quoi res- 
semble-t-elle done ?" " Mon Dieu, a. une poseuse de 
sangsues." The reply struck me as a good example 
of prompt exactness of specification. If you ask a 
French hatter which of two hats is the more com- 
mendable, he will tell you that one of them degage 
mieux la physionomie. The judgment of his English 
congener may be as good (we ourselves perhaps are 
pledged to think it better), but it will be more dumb 
and pointless — he will have less to say about disen- 
gaging the physiognomy. Half the faculty I speak 
of in the French is the expressive part of it. The 
perception and the expression together have been 
worked to-day (for the idiosyncrasy is noticeably mod- 
ern) with immense vigor, and from Balzac to Pierre 
Loti, the latest recruit to the band of painters, the 
successful workers have been the novelists. There 
are different ways of working, and Flaubert, Edmond 
and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Daudet, Maupaussant, 
and the writer to whom I more particularly refer, 
have each had a way of his own. There are story- 
tellers to-day in France who are not students, or at 
any rate not painters, of the mere palpable — but then 
they are not conspicuously anything else. I can think 
of but one writer whose foremost sign, though his lit- 
erary quality is of the highest, does not happen to be 
visual curiosity. M. Paul Bourget looks much more 
within than without, and notes with extraordinary 
closeness the action of life on the soul, especially 
the corrosive and destructive action. Many people 



156 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

in England hold that corrosion and destruction are 
not worth noting; but it should be added that they 
are probably not as a general thing people to whom 
one would go for information on the subject — I mean 
on the subject of the soul. M. Paul Bourget, how- 
ever, is peculiar in this, that he is both master and 
pupil; he is alone, parmi les jeunes ; and, moreover, 
there are other directions in which he is not isolated 
at all, those of tactile sensibility, or isolated only be- 
cause he follows them so far. 

The case was not always as I have here attempted 
to indicate it, for Madame George Sand had an ad- 
mirable faculty of looking within and a compara- 
tively small one of looking without. Attempting, 
some months ago, at Venice, to read over " Consu- 
elo," I was struck on the spot with the very small de- 
gree to which the author troubled herself about close 
representation, the absence of any attempt at it or 
pretension to it ; and I could easily understand the 
scorn with which that sort of irresponsibility (reach- 
ing at times on Madame Sand's part a truly exas- 
perating artlessness) has always filled the votaries of 
the reproductive method. M. Octave Feuillet turns 
his polished glass on the life of the spirit, but what 
he finds in the spirit is little more (as it strikes me) 
than the liveliest phenomena of the flesh. His he- 
roes and heroines are lined on the under side with 
the same stuff as on the upper — a curious social 
silken material, adapted only, as we are constantly 
reminded, to the contacts of patricians. If the soul, 
for the moralizing observer, be a romantic, moon- 



PIERRE LOTI 157 

lighted landscape, with woods and mountains and 
dim distances, visited by strange winds and mur- 
murs, for M. Octave Feuillet it is rather a square 
French salon in white and gold, with portraits of the 
king and queen and the pope, a luminary in old Se- 
vres and plenty of bibelots and sofas. I hasten to 
add that it is an apartment in which one may spend 
an hour most agreeably. Even at present there are 
distinguished variations, if we look outside the group 
of novelists. If there were not a poet like Sully- 
Prudhomme or a moralist like M. Renan, the thesis 
that the French imagination has none but a sensual 
conscience would be made simpler than it ever is to 
prove anything. 

We perceive, on the other hand, that the air of in- 
itiation fails as soon as the inward barrier is crossed, 
and the diminution of credit produced by this failure 
is, I confess, the only Nemesis in which for the pres- 
ent I have confidence. It appears to me, indeed, all- 
sufficient — it appears ideal ; and if the writers I have 
named deserve chastisement for their collective sin 
against proportion (since sin it shall be held), I know 
not how a more terrible one could have been invent- 
ed. The penalty they pay is the heaviest that can 
be levied, the most summary writ that can be served, 
upon a great talent — great talents having, as a gen- 
eral thing, formidable defences — and consists simply 
in the circumstance that, when they lay their hands 
upon the spirit of man, they cease to seem expert. 
This would be a great humiliation if they recognized 
it. They rarely do, however, so far as may be ob- 



158 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

served ; which is a proof that their defences are for- 
midable. There is a distinct transition, at any rate, 
in the case I mention, and assuredly a distinct de- 
scent. As painters they go straight to the mark, as 
analysts they only scratch the surface. We leave 
authority on one side of the line, and encounter on 
the other a curiously complacent and unconscious 
provincialism. Such is the impression we gather in 
every case, though there are some cases in which the 
incongruity is more successfully dissimulated than in 
others. What makes it grow, when once we perceive 
it, is the large and comprehensive pretensions of the 
writers — the sense they give us of camps and ban- 
ners, war-cries and watch-fires. The "Journal" of 
the brothers De Goncourt, of which two volumes have 
lately been put forth, is a very interesting publica- 
tion and suggests many thoughts ; but the first re- 
mark to be made about it is that it makes a hundred 
claims to penetration, to profundity. At the same 
time it is a perfect revelation of the visual passion 
and of the way it may nourish (not joyously indeed 
in this case, but with an air of jealous, nervous, con- 
scious tension), at the expense of other passions and 
even other faculties. Perhaps the best illustration of 
all would be the difference between the superiority of 
Gustave Flaubert as a painter of aspects and sensa- 
tions, and his lapses and limitations, his general in- 
significance, as a painter of ideas and moral states. 
If you feel the talent that abides in his style very 
much (and some people feel it immensely and as a 
sort of blinding glory), you are bribed in a measure 



PIERRE LOTI 159 

to overlook the inequality ; but there comes a mo- 
ment when the bribe, large as it is, is ineffectual. 
His imagination is so fine that we take some time to 
become conscious that almost none of it is moral or 
even human. " Bouvard et Pecuchet," even as an 
unfinished work, has merits of execution that could 
only spring from a great literary energy; but "Bou- 
vard et Pecuchet " is surely, in the extreme juvenil- 
ity of its main idea, one of the oddest productions 
for which a man who had lived long in the world 
was ever responsible. Flaubert, indeed, was the very 
apostle of surface, and an extraordinary example of a 
sort of transposition of the conscience. If for " per- 
version of the natural feelings " (the phrase of the 
letter I quoted) we read inaction rather, and inex- 
perience and indifference in regard to the phenome- 
na of character and the higher kinds of sensibility, 
he will appear to represent the typical disparity at 
its maximum. The brothers De Goncourt strike us 
as knowing as little about these matters as he, but 
somehow it is not suggested to us in the same degree 
that they might have known more. His gift is not 
their gift, and it is his gift that makes us measure 
him by a high standard. "Germinie Lacerteux," 
indeed, without being so fine as " Madame Bovary," 
has great ability ; but nothing else they have writ- 
ten has an equal ability with " Germinie Lacerteux." 
One of the consequences of the generalization I 
have ventured to make is that when a new French 
talent mounts above the horizon we watch with a 
kind of anxiety to see whether it will present itself 



l6o ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

in a subversive and unaccommodating manner. M. 
Pierre Loti is a new enough talent for us still to feel 
something of the glow of exultation at his having 
not contradicted us. He has in fact done exactly 
the opposite. He has added more than we had 
dared to hope to the force of our generalization and 
removed every scruple of a magnanimous sort that 
we might have felt in making it. By scruples of a 
magnanimous sort I mean those that might have 
been engendered by a sense of favors intensely 
enjoyed. At the moment we are under the spell of 
such a talent as Alphonse Daudet's or Emile Zola's 
or Guy de Maupassant's or (to give variety to the 
question) that of so rare and individual a genius as 
this exquisite Loti, it takes no great sophistry to con- 
vince us of the indelicacy, of the ingratitude even, 
of turning an invidious eye on anything so irrele- 
vant as deficiencies. But the spell is foredoomed 
to fluctuations, to lapses, and we end by seeming 
to perceive with perplexity that even literary figures 
so brilliant as these may have too happy, too in- 
solent a lot. Are they after all to enjoy their 
honors without paying for them ? How we should 
have to pay for them if we were to succeed in 
plucking them and wearing them ! The fortunate 
Frenchmen give us the sense of a kind of fatuity 
in impunity, a kind of superficiality in distinction, a 
kind of irritating mastery of the trick of eating your 
cake and having it. Such is one of the reflections 
to which Pierre Loti eventually leads us. In com- 
mon with his companions he performs so beautifully 



PIERRE LOTI l6x 

as to kick up a fine golden dust over the question 
of what he contains — or of what he doesn't. The 
agility of all their movements makes up for the 
thinness of so much of their inspiration. To be so 
constituted as to expose one's self to the charge of 
vulgarity of spirit and yet to have a charm that suc- 
cessfully snaps its fingers at all " charges," is to be 
so lucky that those who work in harder conditions 
surely may allow themselves the solace of small 
criticisms. It may be said that if we indulge in 
small criticisms we resist our author's charm after 
all ; but the answer to this is that the effort to 
throw off our enthralment even for an hour is an 
almost heroic struggle with a sweet superstition. 
The whole second-rate element in Loti, for instance, 
becomes an absolute stain if we think much about 
it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) 
we don't think much about it, so unreserved is our 
surrender to irresistible illusion and contagious life. 
To be so rare that you can be common, so good 
that you can be bad without loss of caste, be a 
mere sponge for sensations and yet not forfeit your 
human character — secure, on the contrary, sympathy 
and interest for it whenever you flash that facet into 
the sun— and then on top of all write, as Goldsmith 
wrote, like an angel — that surely is to wear the 
amulet to some purpose, the literary feather with a 
swagger that becomes pardonable. This rarity of 
the mixture, which makes such a literary unity of 
such a personal duality, is altogether in Pierre Loti 
a source of fascination. He combines aptitudes 



162 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

which seldom sit down to the same table, and com- 
bines them with singular facility and naturalness, an 
air of not caring whether he combines them or not. 
He may not be as ignorant of literature as he pre- 
tends (he protests perhaps a little too much that he 
never opens a book), but it is very clear that what 
is at the bottom of his effect is not (in a degree 
comparable at least to the intensity of the effect) the 
study of how to produce it. What he studies is a 
very different matter, and I know no case in which 
literature, left to come off as it can, comes off so 
beautifully. To be such a rover of the deep, such 
a dabbler in adventure as would delight the soul of 
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, and yet to have at 
one's command a sensitive and expressive appara- 
tus separated by the whole scale from that of Jim 
Hawkins and John Silver, is to have little need of 
"cultivating" originality, as M. Guy de Maupassant 
the other day recommended us to do. An officer in 
the French navy, perpetually circumnavigating the 
globe, M. Loti has spent most of his life (though its 
duration, I believe, has not yet been considerable) 
in strange waters and far lands, and his taste for 
foreign contacts and free manners, for the natural, 
personal life, has led him to cultivate most of his 
opportunities. That taste and those opportunities 
are among soldiers and sailors common enough ; but 
what is not so in the same connection is the spirit 
of the artist, which in M. Loti is as natural as all the 
rest. There is a reflection in regard to the distribu- 
tion of earthly advantages which is probably familiar 



PIERRE LOTI 163 

to most men of letters, and which at any rate often 
occurs to the writer of these lines. The persons who 
see the great things are terribly apt not to be persons 
who can write or even talk about them ; and the per- 
sons who can write about them, reproduce them in 
some way, are terribly apt not to be persons who 
see them. The " chance " is with the blind or the 
dumb, and the immortal form, waiting for a revelation 
that doesn't come, is with the poor sedentary folk 
who bewail the waste of chances. Many an artist 
will have felt his heart sink on questioning some 
travelled friend in vain. The travelled friend has 
not noticed or has nothing to say about things which 
must have had an inestimable suggestiveness. So 
we frame a sort of ideal of success, in which the man 
of action and the man of observation melt into each 
other. The transcendent result is a precious creat- 
ure who knows the sea as well as Captain Marryat, 
and writes about it as well — I can only say as well 
as Pierre Loti. 

" She flew before the weather, the Marie [a fishing-boat in 
the Icelandic waters], flew faster and faster, and the weather 
flew as well, as before something mysterious and terrible. The 
gale, the sea, the Marie herself, were all taken with the same 
madness of flight and speed in the same direction. What scur- 
ried the fastest was the wind ; then the great surges of the 
swell, slower and heavier, rushing after it ; then the Marie, 
borne along in the universal motion. The waves pursued her 
with their blanched crests, rolling in a perpetual fall, and she, 
forever caught, forever left behind, got away from them, all 
the same, by the clever furrow she made in her wake, which 
sucked their rage away. And in this flying pace what they 



164 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

were conscious of above all was the sense of lightness ; they 
felt themselves spring, without trouble or effort. When the 
Maine rose on the billows it was without a shock, as if the 
wind had lifted her ; and then her descent was like a slide. 
. . . She seemed to be sliding backwards, the fleeing moun- 
tain falling away from under her to rush onward, while she 
dropped into one of the great hollows that Avere also rushing. 
She touched its terrible bottom without a hurt, in a splash of 
water which didn't even wet her, but which fled like all the 
rest — fled and fainted ahead, like smoke, like nothing. In the 
depth of these hollows it was darker, and after each wave had 
passed they watched the next coming on behind — the next 
bigger and higher, green and transparent, which hurried up 
with furious contortions, scrolls almost closing over and seeming 
to say, ' Wait till I catch you — till I swallow you up !' But it 
didn't catch you ; it only lifted you as you lift a feather in 
shrugging your shoulders, and you felt it pass under you al- 
most gently, with its gushing foam, the crash of a cascade." 

" Mon Frere Yves " and " Pecheur d'Islande " are 
full of pages as vivid as that, which seem to us to 
place the author among the very first of sea-painters. 

" You made out thousands of voices [in the huge clamor 
of a storm in Northern seas], those above either shrill or deep 
and seeming distant from being so big : that was the wind, 
the great soul of the uproar, the invisible power that carried 
on the whole thing. It was dreadful, but there were other 
sounds as well, closer, more material, more bent on destruction, 
given out by the torment of the water, which crackled as if 
on live coals. And it grew and still grew. In spite of their 
flying pace the sea began to cover them, to ' eat them up,' as 
they said ; first the spray, whipping them from aft, then great 
bundles of water hurled with a force that might smash every- 
thing. The waves grew higher and still crazily higher, and yet 
they were ravelled as they came and you saw them hanging 



PIERRE LOTI 165 

about in great green tatters, which were the falling water 
scattered by the wind. It fell in heavy masses on the deck, 
with the sound of a whack, and then the Marie shuddered all 
over, as if in pain. Now you could make out nothing more, 
on account of this drift of white slobber; when the gusts 
groaned afresh you saw it borne in thicker clouds, like the 
dust on the roads in summer. A heavy rain which had come 
on now passed aslant, almost horizontal, and all these things 
hissed together, lashing and wounding like stripes." 

The English reader may see in such passages as 
these what the English reader is rather apt to see in 
any demonstrative view of difficulty or danger, any 
tendency to insist that a storm is bad or a mountain 
steep — a nervous exaggeration, the emotion of one 
who is not as Englishmen are. But Pierre Loti has 
many other things to say of the ocean than that it 
is a terrible place, and of strange countries than that 
it is a mercy one ever gets there, and the descriptions 
I have quoted are chosen at hazard. " It always 
came to an end suddenly [the hot, tropical rain] ; the 
black curtain drew away slowly, dragging its train 
over the turquoise-tinted sea ; the splendid light 
came forth more astounding after the darkness, and 
the great equatorial sun drank up fast all the water 
we had taken ; the sails, the wood of the ship, the 
awnings recovered their whiteness in the sunshine ; 
the Sibyl put on altogether the bright color of a 
dry thing in the midst of the great blue monotony 
that stretched around her." Pierre Loti speaks bet- 
ter than of anything else of the ocean, the thing in 
the world that, after the human race, has most in- 
tensity and variety of life; but he renders with ex- 



1 66 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

traordinary felicity all the poetry of association, all 
the touching aspects and suggestions in persons, 
places, and objects connected with it, whose essential 
character is that they are more or less its sport and 
its victims. There is always a charming pity and a 
kind of filial passion in his phrase when it rests 
upon the people and things of his wind-swept and 
wave-washed Brittany. The literature of our day 
contains nothing more beautiful than the Breton pas- 
sages, as they may be called, of " Mon Frere Yves " 
and " Pecheur dTslande." There is a sentence in 
the former of these tales, in reference to the inde- 
finable sweetness of the short-lived Breton summer, 
which constitutes a sort of image of the attraction of 
his style. " A compound of a hundred things ; the 
charm of the long, mild days, rarer than elsewhere 
and sooner gone ; the deep, fresh grasses, with their 
extreme profusion of pink flowers ; and then the 
sense of other years which sleeps there, spread 
through everything." All this is in Pierre Loti, the 
mildness and sadness, the profusion of pink flowers, 
and that implication of other conditions at any mo- 
ment, which is the innermost note of the voice of the 
sea. When Gaud, in " Pecheur dTslande," takes 
her walk to the dreary promontory where she hopes 
she may meet her lover, " there were no more trees at 
all now, nothing but the bare heath, with its green 
furze, and here and there the divine crucified cut- 
ting out the great arms of their crosses against the 
sky and making the whole region look like an im- 
mense place of justice." Too long to quote in their 



PIERRE LOTI 167 

fulness are the two admirable pages in the early 
part of the history of Gaud and Yann about the 
winter festival of the pardon of the fishermen, with 
Paimpol full of "the sound of bells and the chant 
of priests, the rude and monotonous songs of the 
taverns — old airs to cradle sailors, old complaintes 
brought from the sea, brought from I know not 
where, from the deep night of time"; full of "old 
granite houses, shutting in the swarm of the crowd ; 
old roofs that told the story of their centuries of 
struggle against the west winds, the salt spray, the 
rains, everything that the sea brings to bear ; the 
story, too, of the warm episodes they had sheltered, 
old adventures of daring and love." Easier to repro- 
duce, in its concision, is the description of the day, 
the last day, before Yann Gaos goes forth on the 
ill-starred expedition from which he never returns: 

" There was no wind from any quarter. The sea had turned 
very gentle ; it was everywhere of the same pale blue and re- 
mained perfectly quiet. The sun shone with a great white 
brightness, and the rough Breton land soaked itself in the light 
as in something fine and rare ; it seemed to feel a cheer and a 
refreshment even to its far-away distances. The air was deli- 
ciously tepid and smelt of summer ; you would have sa;d that 
it had stilled itself forever, that there never again would be 
dark days or tempests. The capes, the bays, without the 
changing shadows of the clouds, drew out in the sunshine their 
great motionless lines. They, too, appeared given up to endless 
rest and tranquillity. ... On the edges of the ways you 
saw little hasty flowers, primroses and violets, pale and with- 
out scent." 

" Madame Chrysantheme," the history of a sum- 



1 68 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

mer spent in very curious conditions at Nagasaki, 
the latest of the author's productions and the most 
distinctively amusing, has less spontaneity than its 
predecessors, and seems more calculated, more made 
to order ; but it abounds in unsurpassable little 
vignettes, of which the portrait of certain Japanese 
ladies of quality whom he met at the photographer's 
is a specimen : 

' ' I couldn't satiate my desire to look at these two creatures ; 
they captivated me like incomprehensible things that one had 
never seen. Their fragile bodies, outlandishly graceful in post- 
ure,- are drowned in stiff materials and redundant sashes, of 
which the ends droop like tired wings. They make me think, 
I don't know why, of great, rare insects; the extraordinary 
patterns on their garments have something of the dark bedizen- 
ment of night-butterflies. Above all, there is the mystery of 
their quite small eyes, drawn back and up so far that the lids 
are tight and they can scarcely open ; the mystery of their ex- 
pression, which seems to denote inner thoughts of a cold, vague 
complacency of absurdity — a world of ideas absolutely closed 
to ourselves." 

It may be that many an English reader will not 
recognize Pierre Loti as a man of action who hap- 
pens to have a genius for literary expression, the 
account he himself gives of his exploits not being 
such as we associate with that character. The term 
action has a wide signification, but there are some 
kinds of life which it represents to us certainly much 
less than others. The exploits of the author of 
" Madame Chrysantheme," of " Ayizade," ~of " Ra- 
rahu," of " Le Roman d'un Spahi," and " Pasquala 
Ivanovitch," are — I hardly know what to call them, 



PIERRE LOTI 169 

for we scarcely mention achievements of this order 
in English — more relaxing on the whole than tonic. 
An author less tonic than Pierre Loti can indeed 
not well be imagined, and the English reader ought 
already to have been notified (the plainest good faith 
requires it and I have delayed much too long) that 
a good deal of what he has to tell us relates mainly 
to his successes among the ladies. We have a great 
and I think a just dislike to the egotistic-erotic, to 
literary confidences on such points, and when a gen- 
tleman abounds in them the last thing we take him 
for is a real man of action. It must be confessed 
that Pierre Loti abounds, though his two best books 
are not autobiographical, and there is simply noth- 
ing to reply to any English reader who on ascertain- 
ing this circumstance may declare that he desires 
to hold no commerce with him ; nothing, that is, but 
the simple remark that such a reader will lose a 
precious pleasure. This warning, however, is a trifle 
to the really scandalized. I maintain my epithet, at 
any rate, and I should desire no better justification 
for it than such an admirable piece as the " Corvee 
Matinale," in the volume entitled " Propos d'Exil," 
which describes how the author put off at dawn 
from a French ship of war, in a small boat with a 
handful of men, to row up a river on the coast of 
Anam and confer, with a view of bringing them 
promptly to terms, with the authorities of the queer- 
est of little Asiatic towns. A writer is to my sense 
quite man of action enough when he has episodes 
like that to relate ; they give a sufficient perfection 



170 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

to the conjunction of the " chance " and the pictorial 
view. Danger has nothing to do with it ; the man- 
ner in which M. Loti gives us on this occasion the 
impression of an almost grotesque absence of dan- 
ger, of ugly mandarins superfluously frightened as 
well as of the color and temperature of the whole 
scene, the steaming banks of the river, with flat 
Asiatic faces peeping out of the rushes, the squalid, 
fetid crowds, the shabby, contorted pagodas, with 
precious little objects glimmering in the shade of 
their open fronts — the vividness of all these sugges- 
tions is the particular sign of this short masterpiece. 
The same remark applies to the " Pagodes Souter- 
raines," in the same volume — the story, told with ad- 
mirable art, of an excursion, while the ship lingers 
exasperatingly on the same hot, insufferable coast, to 
visit certain marvellous old tombs and temples, hewn 
out of a mountain of pink marble, filled with horri- 
ble monstrous effigies and guarded by bonzes almost 
as uncanny. The appreciation of the exotic, which 
M. Jules Lemaitre marks as Loti's distinguishing 
sign, finds perfect expression in such pages as these. 
There are many others of the same sort in the 
" Propos d'Exil," which is a chaplet of pearls ; but 
perhaps the book is above all valuable for the sketch 
entitled "Un Vieux" — the picture of the old age, 
dreary and lamentable, of a worn-out mariner who 
has retired on his pension to a cottage in the sub- 
urbs of Brest. It has delicate sentiment as well as 
an extraordinary objective reality ; but it is not sen- 
timental, for it is characterized by an ineffable pes- 



PIERRE LOTI 



171 



simism and a close, fascinated notation of the inex- 
orable stages by which lonely and vacant old age 
moulders away, with its passions dying, dying very 
hard. " Un Vieux " is singularly ugly, and " Pecheur 
d'Islande " is singularly beautiful ; but I should be 
tempted to say that in Pierre Loti's work "Un 
Vieux" is the next finest thing to "PBcheur d'Isl- 
ande." "Mon Frere Yves" is full of beauty, but 
it carries almost to a maximum the author's charac- 
teristic defect, the absence of composition, the de- 
cousu quality which makes each of his productions 
appear at first a handful of flying leaves. " Un 
Vieux" has a form as a whole, though it occurs to 
me that, perhaps, it is surpassed in this respect by 
another gem of narration or description, the best 
pages of the " Fleurs d'Ennui." (We hesitate for a 
word when it is a question mainly of rendering, as 
Loti renders it, the impression, of giving the material 
illusion, of a strange place and strange manners.) 
I leave to the impartial reader to judge whether 
" Les Trois Dames de la Kasbah," the gem in ques- 
tion (it has been extracted from the " Fleurs d'En- 
nui" and published in a pretty little volume by 
itself), is more or only is less ugly than " Un Vieux." 
That will depend a good deal on whether he be 
shocked by the cynicism of the most veracious of 
all possible representations of the adventures of a 
band of drunken sailors during a stuffy night at 
Algiers. Such, and nothing more (the adventures 
are of the least edifying, and the dhwtiment is not 
even mentionable to ears polite), is the subject of 



172 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

" Les Trois Dames de la Kasbah, Conte Oriental " ; 
and yet the life, the spirit, the color, the communi- 
cative tone, the truth and poetry of this little pro- 
duction are such that one cannot conscientiously 
relegate it (one wishes one could) to a place even 
of comparative obscurity. 

If our author's ruling passion is the appreciation 
of the exotic, it is not in his first works that he con- 
fines his quest to funny calls on nervous mandarins, 
to the twilight gloom of rheumatic old sailors or the 
vulgar pranks of reckless young ones. " Le Roman 
d'un Spahi," " Ayizade," and "Rarahu" each contain 
the history of a love-affair with a primitive woman 
or a combination of primitive women. There is a 
kind of complacent animalism in them which makes 
it difficult to speak of them as the perfection of 
taste, and I profess to be able to defend them on 
the ground of taste only so long as they are not 
attacked. The great point is that they will not be 
attacked by any one who is capable of feeling the 
extraordinary power of evocation of (for instance) 
" Le Manage de Loti " (another name for " Rara- 
hu"), at the same time that he recognizes the ab- 
normal character of such a performance, a charac- 
ter the more marked as the feeling of youth is strong 
in these early volumes, and the young person has 
rarely M. Loti's assurance as a viveicr. He betrays 
a precocity of depravity which is disconcerting. I 
write the gross word depravity because we must put 
the case against him (so many English readers would 
feel it that way) as strongly as it can be put. It 



PIERRE LOTI 173 

doesn't put it strongly enough to say that the serene 
surrender to polygamous practices among coral-reefs 
and in tepid seas is a sign much rather of primitive 
innocence, for there is an element in the affair that 
vitiates the argument. This is simply that the se- 
renity (which, I take it, most makes the innocence) 
cannot under the circumstances be adequate. The 
pen, the talent, the phrase, the style, the note-book 
take care of that and change the whole situation ; 
they invalidate the plea of the primitive. They in- 
troduce the conscious element, and that is the weak 
side of Loti's spontaneities and pastorals. What 
saves him is that his talent never falters, and this 
is but another illustration of his interesting double 
nature. His customs and those of his friends at 
Tahiti, at Stamboul, on the east coast of the Adri- 
atic, or again, according to his latest work, at Na- 
gasaki, are not such as we associate in the least 
with high types ; and yet when we close these va- 
rious records of the general activity known as the 
attitude of "conquest," the impression that abides 
with us is one of surpassing delicacy. The facts 
are singularly vulgar, in spite of the exotic glow 
that wraps them up ; but the subjective side of the 
business, the author's imagination, has an extraor- 
dinary light. Few things could suggest more the 
value that we instinctively attach to a high power 
of evocation — the degree to which we regard it as 
precious in itself. 

What makes the facts vulgar, what justifies us in 
applying to Loti's picture of himself an ironic epi- 



174 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

thet or two, is his almost inveterate habit of repre- 
senting the closest and most intimate personal rela- 
tions as unaccompanied with any moral feeling, any 
impulse of reflection or reaction. He has so often 
the air of not seeming to talk of affection when he 
talks of love — that oddest of all French literary char- 
acteristics, and one to which we owe the circum- 
stance that whole volumes have been written on the 
latter of these principles without an allusion to the 
former. There is a moral feeling in the singular 
friendship of which " Mon Frere Yves" is mainly a 
masterly commemoration, and also a little in the 
hindered passion which at last unites, for infinite 
disaster, alas ! the hero and heroine of " Pecheur 
d'Islande." These are the exceptions ; they are ad- 
mirable and reassuring. The closer, the more inti- 
mate is a personal relation the more we look in it 
for the human drama, the variations and complica- 
tions, the note of responsibility for which we appeal 
in vain to the loves of the quadrupeds. Failing to 
satisfy us in this way, such a relation is not, as Mr. 
Matthew Arnold says of American civilization, in- 
teresting. M. Pierre Loti is too often guilty of the 
simplicity of assuming that when exhibited on his 
own part it is interesting. I should make a point 
of parenthesizing that the picture of the passion 
which holds together in an immortal embrace the 
two great figures of " Pecheur d'Islande " is essen- 
tially a picture of affection. "Rarahu" is a won- 
derful extension of the reader's experience — a study 
of the nonchalance of the strange, attractive Maori 



PIERRE LOTI 175 

race and the private life of Polynesia. The impres- 
sion is irresistible and the transfusion of our con- 
sciousness, as one may say, effected without the waste 
of a drop. The case is the same with "Ayizade," 
and the transfusion this time is into a more capa- 
cious recipient. "Ayizade" relates the adventures 
of a French naval officer who spends a winter, at 
Salonica and Constantinople, in the tolerably suc- 
cessful effort to pass (not only in the eyes of others 
but in his very own) for a Turk, and a Turk of the 
people moreover, with the ingrained superstitions 
and prejudices. He secures in this experiment the 
valuable assistance of sundry unconventional per- 
sons (for his ideal is the Bohemian Turk, if the ex- 
pression may be used), foremost of whom is the lady, 
the wife of a rich and respectable Mussulman, who 
gives her name to the book. It is for M. Loti him- 
self to have judged whether the results were worth 
the trouble ; the great point is that his reader feels 
that he has them, in their reality, without the trouble, 
and is beholden to the author accordingly for one of 
the greatest of literary pleasures. M. Jules Lemaitre, 
whom it is difficult not to quote in speaking of any 
writer of whom he has spoken, gives " Ayizade " 
the high praise of being the finest case of enlarged 
sympathy that he knows, and the most successful 
effort at changing one's skin. Commendation of this 
order it doubtless deserves, equally with " Le Mariage 
de Loti," in spite of the infirmity I have hinted at, 
the fact that the interest is supposed largely to be 
attached to a close personal relation which is not 



176 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

quite human, which is too simplified, too much like 
the loves of the quadrupeds. The desire to change 
his skin is frequent with M. Loti, and it has this odd- 
ity that his preference is almost always for a dusky 
one. We rarely see him attempt to assume the com- 
plexion of one of the fairer races — of the English 
for instance, the fairest perhaps of all. He indulges 
indeed in the convenient fiction that the personage 
of whom Loti was originally the nom de guerre is Mr. 
Harry Grant, a midshipman in her Majesty's service ; 
but this device is perfunctory and the identity is not 
maintained. Nothing could illustrate more our au- 
thor's almost impertinent amateurishness and laxity 
of composition, as well as the circumstance that we 
forgive it at every step, than the artless confusion 
which runs through all his volumes in regard to such 
identities. They don't signify, and it is all, as his 
own idiom has it, sewn with white thread. Loti is 
at once the pseudonym of M. Julien Viaud and the 
assumed name of the hero of a hundred more or 
less scandalous anecdotes. Suddenly he ceases to 
be Harry Grant and becomes an officer in the French 
navy. The brother Yves is one person in the charm- 
ing book which bears his name, and another (appar- 
ently) in " Madame Chrysantheme." The name be- 
comes generic and represents any convivial Breton 
sailor. A curious shadow called Plumkett — a naval 
comrade — wanders vaguely in and out of almost all 
the books, in relations incompatible with each other. 
The odd part of it is that this childish confusion 
does not only not take from our pleasure, but does 



PIERRE LOTI 177 

not even take from our sense of the author's talent. 
It is another of the things which prove Loti's charm 
to be essentially a charm absolute, a charm outside 
of the rules, outside of logic, and independent of 
responsibility. 

In " Madame Chrysantheme " the periodical experi- 
ment is Japanese, the effort on Loti's part has been 
to saturate with the atmosphere of Nipon that oft- 
soaked sponge to which I have ventured to compare 
his imagination. His success has not been so great 
as in other cases, for the simple reason that the Jap- 
anese have not rubbed off on him as freely as the 
Turks and the Tahitans. The act of sympathy has 
not taken place, the experiment is comparatively a 
failure. The wringing-out of the sponge leaves rath- 
er a turbid deposit. The author's taste is for the 
primitive and beautiful, the large and free, and the 
Japanese strike him as ugly and complicated, tiny and 
conventional. His attitude is more profane than our 
own prejudice can like it to be ; he quite declines to 
take them seriously. The reproach, in general, to 
which many people would hold him to be most open, 
is that he takes seriously people and things which 
deserve it less. I may be altogether mistaken, but 
we treat ourselves to the conviction that he fails of 
justice to the wonderful little people who have re- 
newed, for Europe and America, the whole idea of 
Taste. It occurs to us for the first time that he is 
partially closed, slightly narrow, he whose very pro- 
fession it is to be accessible to extreme strangeness, 
and we feel, as devoted readers, a certain alarm. 
12 



178 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

We ask ourselves whether the sponge has been so 
often dipped that it has lost its retentive property, 
and with an anxious desire for reassurance on this 
point we await his next production. 

It is, however, singularly out of place to talk of 
what Pierre Loti may next produce when I have not 
interrupted my general remarks to mention in detail 
the high claims of " Mon Frere Yves " and " Pecheur 
d'Islande." It is of these things above all the friend- 
ly critic must speak if he wishes to speak to friendly 
ears. If our author had written his other books and 
not written these he would have been a curious and 
striking figure in literature; but the two volumes I 
have last named give him a different place altogeth- 
er, and if I had not read and re-read them I should 
not have put forth this general plea. " Mon Frere 
Yves " is imperfect (it is notably, for what it is, too 
long), and " Pecheur d'Islande " is to my sense per- 
fect, yet they have almost an equal part in contribut- 
ing to their author's name an association of supreme 
beauty. The history of Marguerite Mevel and Yann 
Gaos strikes me as one of the very few works of im- 
agination of our day completely and successfully beau- 
tiful. The singular thing is that these two tales, with 
their far finer effect, differ only in degree from their 
predecessors, differ not at all in kind. The part of 
them that deals with the complicated heart is still 
the weakest element; it is still, as in the others, the 
senses that vibrate most (to every impression of air 
and climate and color and weather and season) ; the 
feeling is always the feeling of the great earth — the 



PIERRE LOTI 179 

navigator's earth — as a constant physical solicitation. 
But the picture in each case has everything that gives 
a lift to that susceptibility and nothing that draws it 
down, and the susceptibility finds a language which 
fits it like a glove. The impulse to be human and 
reflective — the author has felt it, indeed, strongly in 
each case ; but it is still primitive humanity that fas- 
cinates him most, and if Yves and Yann and Silves- 
tre and Gaud and the old grandmother Moan are 
more complicated than Ayizade and Samuel and 
Achmet and Fatou-gaye and Rarahu, they are in- 
finitely less so than the young people of either sex 
who supply, the interest of most valid works of fic- 
tion. " Pecheur dTslande " is the history of a pas- 
sion, but of a passion simplified, in its strength, to 
a sort of community with the winds and waves, the 
blind natural forces hammering away at the hard Bre- 
ton country where it is enacted. " Mon Frere Yves " 
relates the history of an incorrigible drunkard and 
coureur, a robust, delightful Breton sailor who, in his 
better moments, reads " Le Marquis de Villemer " 
and weeps over it. (There is a sort of mystification, 
I should remark, in this production, for the English 
reader at least, the book being in a large degree the 
representation of an intimate friendship between the 
sailor and his superior officer, the spectator of his 
career and chronicler of his innumerable relapses. 
Either the conditions which permit of this particular 
variation of discipline are not adequately explained 
or the rigor of the hierarchy is less in the French 
service than in others.) What strikes me in " Pe- 



ISO ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

cheur d'lslande " is the courage which has prompted 
him to appeal to us on behalf of a situation worn so 
smooth by generations of novelists that there would 
seem to be nothing left in it to hook our attention to, 
not to mention the scarcely less manifest fact that it 
is precisely this artless absence of suspicion that he 
was attempting a tour deforce which has drawn down 
the abundance of success. Yann Gaos is a magnifi- 
cent young fisherman — magnificent in stature and 
strength, and shy and suspicious in temper — whose 
trade is to spend his summer hauling up millions of 
cod in the cold and dangerous waters of the North. 
He meets among the coast-folk of his home a very 
clever and pretty girl who receives from him an even 
deeper impression than she gives, but with whom he 
completely fails to come to an understanding. The 
understanding is delayed for two years (thanks largely 
to an absence of "manner" on either side), during 
which the girl's heart comes near to breaking. At 
last, quite suddenly, they find themselves face to face, 
she confessing her misery and he calling himself a 
dolt. They are married in a hurry, to have a short 
honeymoon before he starts for his annual cruise (the 
idea of which fills her with an irresistible foreboding), 
and he sails away to Iceland with his mates. She 
waits in vain for his return, and he never, never comes 
back. This is all the tale can boast in the way of 
plot ; it is the old-fashioned " love-story " reduced to 
a paucity of terms. I am sure M. Loti has no views 
nor theories as to what constitutes and does not con- 
stitute a plot; he has taken no precautions, he has 



PIERRE LOTI l8l 

not sacrificed to any irritated divinity, and yet he has 
filled the familiar, the faded materials with freshness 
and meaning. He has appealed to us on " eternal " 
grounds, and besides the unconscious tour deforce of 
doing so in this particular case successfully we im- 
pute to him the even more difficult feat of having 
dispensed with the aid of scenery. His scenery is 
exactly the absence of scenery; he has placed his 
two lovers in the mere immensity of sea and sky, so 
that they seem suspended in a gray, windy void. We 
see Yann half the time in the perfect blank of fog and 
darkness. A writer with a story to tell that is not 
very fresh usually ekes it out by referring as much as 
possible to surrounding objects. But in this misty 
medium there are almost no surrounding objects to 
refer to, and their isolation gives Yann and Gaud a 
kind of heroic greatness. I hasten to add that, of 
course, the author would not have conjured so well 
had he not been an incomparable painter of the sea. 
The book closes with a passage of strange and admi- 
rable eloquence, which it seems to me that no critic 
speaking of it has a right to omit to quote. I should 
say, as a preliminary, that in the course of the tale 
Yann Gaos, "chaffed" by his comrades on the ques- 
tion of his having a sweetheart and marrying her, has 
declared that for him there is no woman, no wife, no 
bride, none but the ocean to which he is already 
betrothed. Also that a vivid and touching incident 
(as the figure is also itself wonderfully charming) is 
that of the young fisherman Sylvestre Moan, a cousin 
of Gaud and a great friend, though younger, of Yann, 



l82 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

who, called to serve in the navy, is mortally wounded 
at Tonquin, and, on the fetid transport that brings 
him home, dies, suffocating, in the tropics. The au- 
thor relates how he is buried on the way, in a rank, 
bright cemetery, during a short disembarkment at 
Singapore. 

" Yann never came home. One August night, out there off 
the coast of Iceland, in the midst of a great fury of sound, were 
celebrated his nuptials with the sea — with the sea who of old 
had also been his nurse. She had made him a strong and broad- 
chested youth, and then had taken him in his magnificent man- 
hood for herself alone. A deep mystery had enveloped their 
monstrous nuptials. Dusky veils all the while had been shaken 
above them, curtains inflated and twisted, stretched there to hide 
the feast ; and the bride gave voice continually, made her loud- 
est horrible noise to smother the cries. He, remembering Gaud, 
his wife of flesh, had defended himself, struggling like a giant, 
against this spouse who was the grave, until the moment when 
he let himself go, his arms open to receive her, with a great, 
deep cry like the death-roar of a bull, his mouth already full of 
water, his arms open, stretched and stiff forever. And they 
were all at his wedding — all those whom he had bidden of old, 
all except Sylvestre, who, poor fellow, had gone off to sleep in 
enchanted gardens far away on the other side of the earth." 

If it be then a matter of course in France that a 
fresh talent should present its possessor mainly as 
one more raffine in the observation of external things, 
and also, I think I may add, as one more pessimist 
in regard to the nature of man and of woman, and if 
such a presumption appears to have been confirmed 
by an examination of Pierre Loti, in spite of the effort 
of poor Yves to cultivate his will and of the mutual 



PIERRE LOTI 183 

tenderness of Yann and Gaud, our conclusion, all the 
same, will not have escaped the necessity of taking 
into account the fact that. there still seems an inex- 
haustible life for writers who obey this particular in- 
spiration. The Nemesis remains very much what I 
attempted to suggest its being at the beginning of 
these remarks, but somehow the writers over whom 
it hovers enjoy, none the less remarkable health on 
the side on which they are strong. If they have al- 
most nothing to show us in the way of the operation 
of character, the possibilities of conduct, the part 
played in the world by the idea (you would never 
guess, either from Pierre Loti or from M. Guy de 
Maupassant, that the idea has any force or any credit 
in the world) ; if man, for them, is the simple sport 
of fate, with suffering for his main sign — either suf- 
fering or one particular satisfaction, always the same 
— their affirmation of all this is still, on the whole, 
the most complete affirmation that the novel at pres- 
ent offers us. They have on their side the accident, 
if accident it be, that they never cease to be artists. 
They will keep this advantage till the optimists of 
the hour, the writers for whom the life of the soul is 
equally real and visible (lends itself to effects and tri- 
umphs, challenges the power to " render "), begin to 
seem to them formidable competitors. On that day 
it will be very interesting to see what line they take, 
whether they will throw up the battle, surrendering 
honorably, or attempt a change of base. Many intel- 
ligent persons hold that for the French a change of 
base is impossible and that they are either what they 



184 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

incessantly show themselves or nothing. This view, 
of course, derives sanction from that awkward condi- 
tion which I have mentioned as attached to the work 
of those among them who are most conspicuous — the 
fact that their attempts to handle the life of the spirit 
are comparatively so ineffectual. On the other hand, 
it is terribly compromising when those who do handle 
the life of the spirit with the manner of experience 
fail to make their affirmation complete, fail to make 
us take them seriously as artists, and even go so far 
(some of them are capable of that) as to introduce the 
ruinous suggestion that there is perhaps some essen- 
tial reason (I scarcely know how to say it) why ob- 
servers who are of that way of feeling should be a 
little weak in the conjuring line. To be even a little 
weak in representation is, of course, practically and 
for artistic purposes, to be what schoolboys call a 
duffer, and I merely glance, shuddering, at such a 
possibility. What would be their Nemesis, what pen- 
alty would such a group have incurred in their failure 
to rebut triumphantly so damaging an imputation ? 
Who would then have to stand from under? It is 
not Pierre Loti, at any rate, who makes the urgency 
of these questions a matter only for the materialists 
(as it is convenient to call them) to consider. He 
only adds to our suspicion that, for good or for evil, 
they have still an irrepressible life, and he does so 
the more notably that, in his form and seen as a 
whole, he is a renovator, and, as I may say, a re- 
fresher. He plays from his own bat, imitating no 
one, not even nearly or remotely, to my sense — though 



PIERRE LOTI 185 

I have heard the charge made — Chateaubriand. He 
arrives with his bundle of impressions, but they have 
been independently gathered in the world, not in the 
school, and it is a coincidence that they are of the 
same order as the others, expressed in their admira- 
ble personal way and with an indifference to the art 
of transitions which is at once one of the most strik- 
ing cases of literary irresponsibility that I know and 
one of the finest of ingratiation. He has settled 
the question of his own superficies (even in the pa- 
thos of the sacred reunion of his lovers in " Pecheur 
d'Islande" there is something inconvertibly carnal), 
but he has not settled the other, the general question 
of how long and how far accomplished and exclusive 
' — practically exclusive — impressionism will yet go, 
with its vulture on its back and feeding on it. I hope 
I appear not to speak too apocalyptically in saying 
that the problem is still there to minister to our in- 
terest and perhaps even a little to our anxiety. 

1888. 



THE JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS 
DE GONCOURT 

I can scarcely forbear beginning these limited re- 
marks on an interesting subject with a regret — the 
regret that I had not found the right occasion to 
make them two or three years ago. This is not be- 
cause since that time the subject has become less 
attaching, but precisely because it has become more 
so, has become so absorbing that I am oppressively 
conscious of the difficulty of treating it. It was never, 
I think, an easy one ; inasmuch as for persons inter- 
ested in questions of literature, of art, of form, in the 
general question of the observation of life for an 
artistic purpose, the appeal and the solicitation of 
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were essentially not 
simple and soothing. The manner of this extraor- 
dinary pair, their temper, their strenuous effort and 
conscious system, suggested anything but a quick 
solution of the problems that seemed to hum in our 
ears as we read ; suggested it almost as little indeed 
as their curious, uncomfortable style, with its multi- 
plied touches and pictorial verbosity, was apt to evoke 
an immediate vision of the objects to which it made 
such sacrifices of the synthetic and the rhythmic. 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 187 

None the less, if one liked them well enough to per- 
sist, one ended by making terms with them ; I allude 
to the liking as conditional, because it appears to be 
a rule of human relations that it is by no means al- 
ways a sufficient bond of sympathy for people to care 
for the same things : there may be so increasing a 
divergence when they care for them in different ways. 
The great characteristic of the way of the brothers 
De Goncourt was that it was extraordinarily "mod- 
ern " ; so illustrative of feelings that had not yet found 
intense expression in literature that it made at last 
the definite standpoint, the common ground and the 
clear light for taking one's view of them. They bris- 
tled (the word is their own) with responsible profes- 
sions, and took us farther into the confidence of their 
varied sensibility than we always felt it important 
to penetrate ; but the formula that expressed them 
remained well in sight. They were historians and 
observers who were painters; they composed biogra- 
phies, they told stories, with the palette always on 
their thumb. 

Now, however, all that is changed and the case is 
infinitely more complicated. M. Edmond de Gon- 
court has published, at intervals of a few months, the 
Journal kept for twenty years by his brother and 
himself, and the Journal makes all the difference. 
The situation was comparatively manageable before, 
but now it strikes us as extremely embarrassing. 
M. Edmond de Goncourt has mixed the cards in the 
most extraordinary way ; he has shifted his position 
with a carelessness of consequences of which I know 



l88 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

no other example. Who can recall an instance of an 
artist's having it in his power to deprive himself of 
the advantage of the critical perspective in which he 
stands, and being eager to use that power? 

That MM. de Goncourt should have so faithfully 
carried on their Journal is a very interesting and 
remarkable fact, as to which there will be much to 
say ; but it has almost a vulgarly usual air in com- 
parison with the circumstance that one of them has 
judged best to give the document to the light. If it 
be true that the elder and surviving brother has held 
a part of it back, that only adds to the judicious, 
responsible quality of the act. He has selected, and 
that indicates a plan and constitutes a presumption 
of sanity. There has been, so to speak, a method in 
M. Edmond de Goncourt's madness. I use the term 
madness because it so conveniently covers most of 
the ground. How else indeed should one express it 
when a man of talent defaces with his own hand not 
only the image of himself that public opinion has 
erected on the highway of literature, but also the im- 
age of a loved and lost partner who can raise no 
protest and offer no explanation ? If instead of pub- 
lishing his Journal M. de Goncourt had burned it up 
we should have been deprived of a very curious and 
entertaining book; but even with that consciousness 
we should have remembered that it would have been 
impertinent to expect him to do anything else. Bare- 
ly conceivable would it have been had he withheld 
the copious record from the flames for the perusal of 
a posterity who would pass judgment on it when he 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 189 

himself should be dust. That would have been an 
act of high humility — the sacrifice of the finer part of 
one's reputation ; but, after all, a man can commit 
suicide only in his lifetime, and the example would 
have had its distinction on the part of a curious mind 
moved by sympathy with the curiosity of a coming 
age. 

If I suggest that if it were possible to us to hear 
Jules de Goncourt's voice to-day it might convey an 
explanation, this perhaps represents an explanation 
as more possible than we see it as yet. Certainly 
it is difficult to see it as graceful or as conciliatory. 
There is scarcely any account we can give of the mo- 
tive of the act that doesn't make it almost less an 
occasion for complacency than the act itself. (I still 
refer, of course, to the publication, not to the com- 
position, of the Journal. The composition, for ner- 
vous, irritated, exasperated characters, may have been 
a relief — though even in this light its operation ap- 
pears to have been slow and imperfect. Indeed, it 
occurs to one that M. Edmond de Goncourt may have 
felt the whimsical impulse to expose the fond remedy 
as ineffectual.) If the motive was not humility, not 
mortification, it was something else — something that 
we can properly appreciate only by remembering that 
it is not enough to be proud, and that the question 
inevitably comes up of what one's pride is about. If 
MM. de Goncourt were two almost furious nevrosh, 
if the infinite vibration of their nerves and the sore- 
ness of their sentient parts were the condition on 
which they produced many interesting books, the fact 



190 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

was pathetic and the misfortune great, but the legiti- 
macy of the whole thing was incontestable. People 
are made as they are made, and some are weak in 
one way and some in another. What passes our com- 
prehension is the state of mind in which their weak- 
ness appears to them a source of glory or even of 
dolorous general interest. It may be an inevitable, 
or it may even for certain sorts of production be an 
indispensable, thing to be a n'evrose ; but in what par- 
ticular juncture is it a communicable thing? M. de 
Goncourt not only communicates the case, but insists 
upon it ; he has done personally what M. Maxime du 
Camp did a few years ago for Gustave Flaubert (in 
his " Souvenirs Litteraires ") when he made known 
to the world that the author of " Madame Bovary " 
had epileptic fits. The differences are great, how- 
ever, for if we are disposed to question M. du Camp's 
right to put another person's secret into circulation, 
we must admit that he does so with compunction and 
mourning. M. de Goncourt, on the other hand, waves 
the banner of the infirmity that his collaborateur shared 
with him and invites all men to listen to the details. 
About his right, I hasten to add, so far as he speaks 
for himself, there is nothing dubious, and this puts us 
in a rare position for reading and enjoying his book. 
We are not accomplices and our honor is safe. Peo- 
ple are betrayed by their friends, their enemies, their 
biographers, their critics, their editors, their publish- 
ers, and so far as we give ear in these cases we are 
not quite without guilt ; but it is much plainer sailing 
when the burden of defence rests on the very suffer- 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 191 

ers. What would have been thought of a friend or 
an editor, what would have been thought even of an 
enemy, who should have ventured to print the Jour- 
nal of MM. de Goncourt ? 

The reason why it must always be asked in future, 
with regard to any appreciation of these gentlemen, 
"Was it formed before the Journal or after the 
Journal ?" is simply that this publication has ob- 
truded into our sense of their literary performance 
the disturbance of a revelation of personal character. 
The scale on which the disturbance presents itself is 
our ground for surprise, and the nature of the char- 
acter exhibited our warrant for regret. The compli- 
cation is simply that if to-day we wish to judge the 
writings of the brothers De Goncourt freely, largely, 
historically, the feat is almost impossible. We have 
to reckon with a prejudice — a prejudice of our own. 
And that is why a critic may be sorry to have missed 
the occasion of testifying to a liberal comprehension 
before the prejudice was engendered. Almost im- 
possible, I say, but fortunately not altogether ; for is 
it not the very function of criticism and the sign of 
its intelligence to acquit itself honorably in embar- 
rassing conditions and track the idea with patience 
just in proportion as it is elusive ? The good method 
is always to sacrifice nothing. Let us therefore not 
regret too much either that MM. de Goncourt did 
not burn their Journal if they wished their novels 
to be liked, or that they did not burn their novels if 
they wished their Journal to be forgotten. The diffi- 
cult point to deal with as regards this latter produc- 



192 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

tion is that it is a journal of pretensions ; for is it not 
a sound generalization to say that when we speak of 
pretensions we always mean pretensions exaggerated ? 
If the Journal sets them forth, it is in the novels that 
we look to see them justified. If the justification is 
imperfect, that will not disgust us, for what does the 
disparity do more than help to characterize our au- 
thors ? The importance of their being characterized 
depends largely on their talent (for people engaged 
in the same general effort and interested in the same 
questions), and of a poverty of talent even the reader 
most struck with the unamiable way in which, as dia- 
rists, they for the most part use their powers will 
surely not accuse MM. de Goncourt. They express, 
they represent, they give the sense of life ; it is not 
always the life that such and such a one of their read- 
ers will find most interesting, but that is his affair 
and not theirs. Theirs is to vivify the picture. This 
art they unmistakably possess, and the Journal testi- 
fies to it still more than "Germinie Lacerteux" and 
" Manette Salomon " ; infinitely more, I may add, than 
the novels published by M. Edmond de Goncourt 
since the death of his brother. 

I do not pronounce for the moment either on the 
justice or the generosity of the portrait of Sainte- 
Beuve produced in the Journal by a thousand small 
touches, entries made from month to month and year 
to year, and taking up so much place in the whole 
that the representation of that figure (with the Prin- 
cess Mathilde, Gavarni, Theophile Gautier, and Gus- 
tave Flaubert thrown in a little behind) may almost 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 1 93 

be said to be the main effect of the three volumes. 
What is incontestable is the intensity of the vision, 
the roundness of the conception, and the way that 
the innumerable little parts of the image hang togeth- 
er. The Sainte-Beuve of MM. de Goncourt may not 
be the real Sainte-Beuve, but he is a wonderfully pos- 
sible and consistent personage. He is observed with 
detestation, but at least he is observed, and the faculty 
is welcome and rare. This is what we mean by talent 
— by having something fresh to contribute. Let us be 
grateful for anything at all fresh so long as our grati- 
tude is not chilled — a case in which it has always the 
resource of being silent. It is obvious that this check 
is constantly at hand in our intercourse with MM. de 
Goncourt, for the simple reason that, with the great- 
est desire in the world to see all round, we cannot 
rid ourselves of the superstition that, when all is said 
and done, art is most in character when it most shows 
itself amiable. It is not amiable when it is narrow 
and exclusive and jealous, when it makes the deplor- 
able confession that it has no secret for resisting ex- 
asperation. It is not the sign of a free intelligence or 
a rich life to be hysterical because somebody's work 
whom you don't like affirms itself in opposition to 
that of somebody else whom you do ; but this condi- 
tion is calculated particularly little to please when 
the excitement springs from a comparison more per- 
sonal. It is almost a platitude to say that the artistic 
passion will ever most successfully assuage the pop- 
ular suspicion that there is a latent cruelty in it when 
it succeeds in not appearing to be closely connected 
13 



194 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

with egotism. The uncalculated trick played by our 
authors upon their reputation was to suppose that 
their name could bear such a strain. It is tolerably 
clear that it can't, and this is the mistake we should 
have to forgive them if we proposed to consider their 
productions as a whole. It doesn't cover all the 
ground to say that the injury of their mistake is only 
for themselves : it is really in some degree for those 
who take an interest in the art they practise. Such 
eccentrics, such passionate seekers, may not, in Eng- 
land and America, be numerous ; but even if they are 
a modest band, their complaint is worth taking ac- 
count of. No one can ever have been nearly so 
much interested in the work of Edmond and Jules 
de Goncourt as these gentlemen themselves ; their 
deep absorption in it, defying all competition, is one 
of the honorable sides of their literary character. But 
the general brotherhood of men of letters may very 
well have felt humiliated by the disclosure of such 
wrath in celestial, that is, in analogous minds. It is, 
in short, rather a shock to find that artists who could 
make such a miniature of their Sainte-Beuve have 
not carried their delicacy a little further. It is al- 
ways a pain to perceive that some of the qualities 
we prize don't imply the others. 

What makes it important not to sacrifice the Jour- 
nal (to speak for the present only of that) is this 
very illustration of the degree to which, for the inde- 
fatigable diarists, the things of literature and art are 
the great realities. If every genuine talent is for the 
critic a " case " constituted by the special mixture of 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 195 

elements and faculties, it is not difficult to put one's 
finger on the symptoms in which that of these unani- 
mous brothers resides. It consists in their feeling 
life so exclusively as a theme for descriptive picto- 
rial prose. Their exclusiveness is, so far as I know, 
unprecedented ; for if we have encountered men of 
erudition, men of science as deeply buried in learn- 
ing and in physics, we have never encountered a 
man of letters (our authors are really one in their 
duality) for whom his profession was such an ex- 
haustion of his possibilities. Their friend and 
countryman Flaubert doubtless gave himself up to 
" art " with as few reservations, but our authors have 
over him exactly the superiority that the Journal 
gives them : it is a proof the more of their concen- 
tration, of their having drawn breath only in the 
world of subject and form. If they are not more 
representative, they are at least more convenient to 
refer to. Their concentration comes in part from the 
fact that it is the meeting of two natures, but this 
also would have counted in favor of expansion, of 
leakage. " Collaboration " is always a mystery, and 
that of MM. de Goncourt was probably close beyond 
any other ; but we have seen the process successful 
several times, so that the real wonder is not that in 
this case the parties to it should have been able to 
work together, to divide the task without dividing 
the effect, but rather that nature should have struck 
off a double copy of a rare original. An original is 
a conceivable thing, but a pair of originals who are 
original in exactly the same way is a phenomenon 



196 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

embodied so far as I know only in the authors of 
" Manette Salomon." The relation borne by their 
feelings on the question of art and taste to their 
other feelings (which they assure us were very much 
less identical), this peculiar proportion constitutes 
their originality. In whom was ever the group of 
" other feelings " proportionately so small ? In 
whom else did the critical vibration (in respect to 
the things cared for, limited in number, even very 
limited, I admit) represent so nearly the totality of 
emotion ? The occasions left for MM. de Gon court 
to vibrate differently were so few that they scarcely 
need be counted. 

The manifestation of life that most appeals to 
them is the manifestation of Watteau, of Lancret, of 
Boucher, of Fragonard ; they are primarily critics of 
pictorial art (with sympathies restricted very much 
to a period) whose form of expression happens to 
be literary, but whose sensibility is the sensibility 
of the painter and the sculptor, and whose attempt, 
allowing for the difference of the instrument, is to 
do what the painter and the sculptor do. The most 
general stricture to be made on their work is prob- 
ably that they have not allowed enough for the 
difference of the instrument, have persisted in the 
effort to render impressions that the plastic artist 
renders better, neglecting too much those he is 
unable to render. From time to time they have put 
forth a volume which is really an instructive instance 
of misapplied ingenuity. In " Madame Gervaisais," 
for example, a picture of the visible, sketchable 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 197 

Rome of twenty-five years ago, we seem to hear the 
voice forced to sing in a register to which it doesn't 
belong, or^rather (the comparison is more complete) 
to attempt effects of sound that are essentially not 
vocal. The novelist competes with the painter and 
the painter with the novelist, in the treatment of the 
aspect and figure of things; but what a happy tact 
each of them needs to keep his course straight, with- 
out poaching on the other's preserves ! In Eng- 
land it is the painter who is apt to poach most, 
and in France the writer. However this may be, 
no one probably has poached more than have MM. 
de Goncourt. 

Whether it be because there is something that 
touches us in pious persistence in error, or because 
even when it prevails there may on the part of a 
genuine talent be the happiest hits by the way, I 
will not pretend to declare ; certain it is that the 
manner in which our authors abound in their own 
sense and make us feel that they would not for the 
world care for anything but what exactly they do 
care for, raises the liveliest presumption in their 
favor. If literature is kept alive by a passion loyal 
even to narrowness, MM. de Goncourt have ren' 
dered real services. They may look for it on the 
one side in directions too few, and on the other in 
regions thankless and barren ; their Journal, at all 
events, is a signal proof of their good faith. Won- 
derful are such courage and patience and industry; 
fatigued, displeased, disappointed, they never inter- 
mit their chronicle nor falter in their task. We owe 



198 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

to this remarkable feat the vivid reflection of their 
life for twenty years, from the coup d'etat which pro- 
duced the Second Empire to the death of the younger 
brother on the eve of the war with Germany ; the 
history of their numerous books, their articles, their 
studies, studies on the social and artistic history of 
France during the latter half of the last century — 
on Mme. de Pompadour, Mme. du Barry, and the 
other mistresses of Louis XV., on Marie Antoinette, 
on society and la femme during the Revolution and 
the Directory ; the register, moreover, of their ad- 
ventures and triumphs as collectors (collectors of the 
furniture, tapestries, drawings of the last century), 
of their observations of every kind in the direction 
in which their nature and their milieu prompt them 
to observe, of their talks, their visits, their dinners, 
their physical and intellectual states, their projects 
and visions, their ambitions and collapses, and, above 
all, of their likes and dislikes. Above all of their 
dislikes, perhaps I should say, for in this sort of 
testimony the Journal is exceedingly rich. The 
number of things and of people obnoxious to their 
taste is extremely large, especially when we consider 
the absence of variety, as the English reader judges 
variety, in their personal experience. What strikes 
an English reader, curious about a society in which 
acuteness has a high development and thankful for 
a picture of it, is the small surface over which the 
career of MM. de Goncourt is distributed. It seems 
all to take place in a little ring, a coterie of a dozen 
people. Movement, exercise, travel, other countries, 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 1 99 

play no part in it ; the same persons, the same 
places, names, and occasions perpetually recur ; 
there is scarcely any change of scene or any enlarge- 
ment of horizon. The authors rarely go into the 
country, and when they do they hate it, for they find 
it bete. To the English mind that item probably de- 
scribes them better than anything else. We end with 
the sensation of a closed room, of a want of venti- 
lation ; we long to open a window or two and let in 
the air of the world. The Journal of MM. de Gon- 
court is mainly a record of resentment and suffering, 
and to this circumstance they attribute many causes; 
but we suspect at last that the real cause is for them 
too the inconvenience from which we suffer as read- 
ers — simply the want of space and air. 

Though the surface of the life represented is, as 
I have said, small, it is large enough to contain a 
great deal of violent reaction, an extraordinary quan- 
tity of animadversion, indignation, denunciation. In- 
deed, as I have intimated, the simplest way to sketch 
the relation of disagreement of our accomplished 
diarists would be to mention the handful of persons 
and things excepted from it. They are " down " 
absolutely on Sainte-Beuve and strongly on MM. 
Taine and Scherer. But I am taking the wrong 
course. The great exceptions then, in addition to 
the half-dozen friends I have mentioned (the Prin- 
cess, Gavarni, Theophile Gautier, Flaubert, and Paul 
de Saint- Victor, though the two last named with re- 
strictions which finally become in the one case con- 
siderable and in the other very marked), are the 



200 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

artistic production of the reign of Louis XV. and 
some of the literary, notably that of Diderot, which 
they oppose with a good deal of acrimony to that 
of Voltaire. They have also no quarrel with the 
wonderful figure of Marie Antoinette, unique in its 
evocation of luxury and misery, as is proved by the 
elaborate monograph which they published in 1858. 
This list may appear meagre, but I think it really 
exhausts their positive sympathies, so far as the 
Journal enlightens us. That is precisely the inter- 
esting point and the fact that arrests us, that the 
Journal, copious as a memorandum of the artistic 
life, is in sc abnormally small a degree a picture of 
enjoyment. Such a fact suggests all sorts of reflec- 
tions, and in particular an almost anxious one as to 
whether the passionate artistic life necessarily ex- 
cludes enjoyment. I say the passionate because this 
makes the example better ; it is only passion that 
gives us revelations and notes. If the artist is nec- 
essarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its 
essence a state constantly liable to shade off into 
the morbid ? Does this liability, moreover, increase 
in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition 
intense ? MM. de Goncourt have this ground for 
expecting us to cite their experience in the affir- 
mative, that it is an experience abounding in rev- 
elations. I don't mean to say that they are all, 
but only that they are preponderantly, revelations of 
suffering. In the month of March, 1859, in allusion 
to their occupations and projects, they make the ex- 
cellent remark, the fruit of acquired wisdom, that 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 201 

" In this world one must do a great deal, one must 
intend a great deal." That is refreshing, that is a 
breath of air. But as a general thing what they com- 
memorate as workers is the simple break-down of joy. 
" Tell us," they would probably say, " where you 
will find an analysis equally close of the cheerfulness 
of creation, and then we will admit that our testi- 
mony is superficial. Many a record of a happy per- 
sonal life, yes ; but that is not to the point. The 
question is how many windows are opened, how 
man}'- little holes are pierced, into the consciousness 
of the artist. Our contention would be that we 
have pierced more little holes than any other gimlet 
has achieved. Doubtless there are many people who 
are not curious about the consciousness of the artist 
and who would look into our little holes — if the 
sense of a kind of indelicacy, even of indecency in 
the proceeding were not too much for them — mainly 
with some ulterior view of making fun of them. Of 
course the better economy for such people is to let 
us alone. But if you are curious (there are a few 
who happen to be), where will you get to the same 
degree as in these patient pages the particular sen- 
sation of having your curiosity stimulated and fed ? 
Will you get it in the long biography of Scott, in 
that of Dickens, in the autobiography of Trollope, 
in the letters of Thackeray ? An intimation has 
reached us that in reading the letters of Thackeray 
you are moved, on the contrary, to wonder by what 
trick certain natural little betrayals of the conscious- 
ness of the artist have been conjured away. Very 



202 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

likely (we see you mean it) such betrayals are ' nat- 
ural'' only when people have a sense of responsi- 
bility. This sense may very well be a fault, but it 
is a fault to which the world owes some valuable 
information. Ah ! of course if you don't think our 
information valuable, there is no use talking." The 
most convenient answer to this little address would 
probably be the remark that valuable information 
is supplied by the artist in more ways than one, and 
that we must look for it in his finished pieces as 
well as in his note-books. If we should see a flaw 
in this supposititious plea of our contentious friends 
it would be after turning back to " Germinie Lacer- 
teux" and "Manette Salomon." Distinguished and 
suggestive as these performances are, they do not 
illustrate the artistic view so very much more than 
the works of those writers whose neglect of the 
practice of keeping a diary of protest lays them 
open to the imputation of levity. 

In reading the three volumes pencil in hand, I 
have marked page after page as strongly character- 
istic, but I find in turning them over that it would 
be difficult to quote from them without some prin- 
ciple of selection. The striking passages or pages 
range themselves under three or four heads — the 
observation of persons, the observation of places 
and things (works of art, largely), the report of con- 
versations, and the general chapter of the subjec- 
tive, which, as I have hinted, is the general chapter 
of the saignant. " During dinner," I read in the 
second volume, "nous avons Vagaccment of hearing 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 203 

Sainte-Beuve, the fine talker, the fine connoisseur 
in letters, talk art in a muddled manner, praise Eu- 
gene Delacroix as a philosophical painter," etc. 
These words, nous avons Vagacement, might stand as 
the epigraph of the Journal at large, so exact a 
translation would they be of the emotion apparently 
most frequent with the authors. On every possible 
and impossible occasion they have the annoyance. I 
hasten to add that I can easily imagine it to have 
been an annoyance to hear the historian of Port 
Royal talk, and talk badly, about Eugene Delacroix. 
But on whatever subject he expressed himself he 
seems to have been to the historians of Manette 
Salomon even as a red rag to a bull. The aversion 
they entertained for him, a plant watered by fre- 
quent intercourse and protected by punctual notes, 
has brought them good luck ; in this sense, I mean, 
that they have made a more living figure of him than 
of any name in their work. The taste of the whole 
evocation is, to my mind and speaking crudely, atro- 
cious ; there is only one other case (the portrait of 
Madame de Paiva) in which it is more difficult to 
imagine the justification of so great a license. Noth- 
ing of all this is quotable by a cordial admirer of 
Sainte-Beuve, who, however, would resent the treach- 
ery of it even more than he does if he were not care- 
ful to remember that the scandalized reader has 
always the resource of opening the " Causeries du 
Lundi." MM. de Goncourt write too much as if they 
had forgotten that. The thirty volumes of that won- 
derful work contain a sufficiently substantial answer 



204 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

to their account of the figure he cut when they dined 
with him as his invited guests or as fellow-members 
of a brilliant club. Impression for impression, we 
have that of the Causeries to set against that of the 
Journal, and it takes the larger hold of us. The 
reason is that it belongs to the finer part of Sainte- 
Beuve ■, whereas the picture from the Goncourt gal- 
lery (representing him, for instance, as a petit merrier 
de province en partie fine) deals only with his personal 
features. These are important, and they were unfor- 
tunately anything but superior ; but they were not 
so important as MM. de Goncourt's love of art, for 
art makes them, nor so odious surely when they 
were seen in conjunction with the nature of his ex- 
traordinary mind. Upon the nature of his extraor- 
dinary mind our authors throw no more light than 
his washerwoman or his shoemaker might have done. 
They may very well have said, of course, that this 
was not their business, and that the fault was the 
eminent critic's if his small and ugly sides were 
what showed most in his conversation. Their busi- 
ness, they may contend, was simply to report that 
conversation and its accompaniment of little, com- 
promising personal facts as minutely and vividly as 
possible ; to attempt to reproduce for others the 
image that moved before them with such infirmities 
and limitations. Why for others ? the reader of these 
volumes may well ask himself in this connection as 
well as in many another ; so clear does it appear to 
him that he must have been out of the question of 
Sainte-Beuve's private relations — just as he feels that 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 205 

he was never included in that of Madame de Pai'va's 
or the Princess Mathilde's. We are confronted afresh 
with the whole subject of critical discretion, the re- 
sponsibility of exposure, and the strange literary man- 
ners of our day. The Journal of MM. de Goncourt 
will have rendered at least the service of fortifying 
the blessed cause of occasional silence. If their am- 
bition was to make Sainte-Beuve odious, it has suf- 
fered the injury that we are really more disagreeably 
affected by the character of the attack. That is more 
odious even than the want of private dignity of a 
demoralized investigator. And in this case the ques- 
tion the reader further asks is, Why even for them- 
selves ? and what superior interest was served by the 
elaboration week by week of this minute record of 
an implacable animosity ? Keeping so patiently-writ- 
ten, so crossed and dotted and dated a register of 
hatred is a practice that gives the queerest account 
of your own nature, and indeed there are strange 
lights thrown throughout these pages on that of MM. 
de Goncourt. There is a kind of ferocity in the way 
the reporter that abides in them (how could they 
have abstained from kicking him out of doors with 
a "You're very clever, but you're really a bird of 
night"?) pursues the decomposing causeur to the 
end, seeking effects of grotesqueness in the aspects 
of his person and the misery of his disease. 

All this is most unholy, especially on the part of 
a pair of delicats. MM. de Goncourt, I know, pro- 
fess a perfect readiness to relinquish this title in cer- 
tain conditions ; they consider that there is a large 



2 06 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

delicacy and a small one, and they remind us of the 
fact that they could never have written " Germinie 
Lacerteux" if they had been afraid of being called 
coarse. In fact they imply, I think, that for people 
of masculine observation the term has no relevancy 
at all ; it is simply non-observant in its associations 
and exists for the convenience of the ladies — a re- 
spectable function, but one of which the importance 
should not be overrated. This idea is luminous, 
but it will probably never go far without plumping 
against another, namely, that there is a reality in the 
danger of feeling coarsely, that the epithet represents 
also a state of perception. Does it come about, the 
danger in question, in consequence of too prolonged 
a study, however disinterested, of the uglinesses and 
uncleannesses of life ? It may occur in that fashion 
and it may occur in others ; the point is that we 
recognize its ravages when we encounter them, and 
that they are a much more serious matter than the 
accident — the source of some silly reproach to our 
authors — of having narrated the history of an hys- 
terical servant -girl. That is a detail ("Germinie 
Lacerteux" is a very brilliant experiment), whereas 
the catastrophe I speak of is of the very essence. 
We know it has taken place when we begin to notice 
that the artist's instrument has parted with the qual- 
ity which is supposed to make it most precious — 
the fineness to which it owed its sureness, its exemp- 
tion from mistakes. The spectator's disappointment 
is great, of course, in proportion as his confidence 
was high. The fine temper of MM. de Goncourt 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 2 07 

had inspired us with the highest ; their whole atti- 
tude had been a protest against vulgarity. Mere 
prettiness of subject — we were aware of the very 
relative place they give to that ; but, on the other 
hand, had they not mastered the whole gamut of the 
shades of- the aristocratic sense ? Was not a part 
of the charm of execution of "Germinie Lacerteux" 
the glimpse of the taper fingers that wielded the 
brush ? It was not perhaps the brush of Vandyck, 
but might Vandyck not have painted the white hand 
that held it ? It is no white hand that holds, alas, 
this uncontrollably querulous and systematically 
treacherous pen. "Memoires de la Vie Litteraire" 
is the sub-title of their Journal ; but what sort of a 
life will posterity credit us with having led and for 
what sort of chroniclers will they take the two gen- 
tlemen who were assiduous attendants at the Diner 
Magny only to the end that they might smuggle in, 
as it were, the uninvited (that is, you and me who 
read), and entertain them at the expense of their col- 
leagues and comrades ? The Diner Magny was a club, 
the club is a high expression of the civilization of 
our time ; but the way in which MM. de Goncourt 
interpret the institution makes them singular partici- 
pants of that civilization. It is a strange perform- 
ance, when one thinks of the performers — celebrated 
representatives of the refinement of their age. " If 
this was the best society," our grandchildren may 
say, "what could have been the prockdes in that 
which was not so good?" 

It is the firm conviction of many persons that 



208 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

literature is not doing well, that it is even distinctly 
on the wane, and that before many years it will have 
ceased to exist in any agreeable form, so that those 
living at that period will have to look far back for 
any happy example of it. May it not occur to us 
that if they look back to the phase lately embodied 
by MM. de Goncourt it will perhaps strike them 
that their loss is not cruel, since the vanished boon 
was, after all, so far from guaranteeing the ameni- 
ties of things ? May the moral not appear pointed 
by the authors of the Journal rather than by the 
confreres they have sacrificed ? We of the English 
tongue move here already now in a region of uncer- 
tain light, where our proper traditions and canons 
cease to guide our steps. The portions of the work 
before us that refer to Madame de Pa'iva, to the 
Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, leave us absolutely 
without a principle of appreciation. If it be correct 
according to the society in which they live, we have 
only to learn the lesson that we have no equivalent 
for some of the ideas and standards of that society. 
We read on one page that our authors were personal 
friends of Madame de Pa'iva, her guests, her inter- 
locutors, recipients of her confidence, partakers of 
her hospitality, spectators of her splendor. On the 
next we see her treated like the last of the last, with 
not only her character but her person held up to our 
irreverent inspection, and the declaration that " elle 
s'est toute crachee," in a phrase which showed one 
day that she was purse-proud. Is it because the lady 
owed her great wealth to the favors of which she had 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 209 

been lavish that MM. de Goncourt hold themselves 
free to turn her friendship to this sort of profit ? 
If Madame de Pai'va was good enough to dine, 
or anything else, with, she was good enough either 
to speak of without brutality or to speak of not at 
all. Does not this misdemeanor of MM. de Gon- 
court perhaps represent, where women are concerned, 
a national as well as a personal tendency — a ten- 
dency which introduces the strangest of complica- 
tions into the French theory of gallantry? Our 
Anglo-Saxon theory has only one face, while the 
French appears to have two ; with " Make love to 
her," as it were, on one side, and "Tue-la" on the 
other. The French theory, in a word, involves a 
great deal of killing, and the ladies who are the 
subject of it must often ask themselves whether they 
do not pay dearly for this advantage of being made 
love to. By " killing " I allude to the exploits of 
the pen as well as to those of the directer weapons 
so ardently advocated by M. Dumas the younger. 
On what theory has M. Edmond de Goncourt handed 
over to publicity the whole record of his relations 
with the Princess Mathilde ? He stays in her house 
for days, for weeks together, and then portrays for 
our entertainment her person, her clothes, her gest- 
ures, and her salon, repeating her words, reproducing 
her language, relating anecdotes at her expense, de- 
scribing the freedom of speech used towards her by 
her convives, the racy expressions that passed her 
own lips. In one place he narrates (or is it his 
brother ?) how the Princess was unable to resist the 
14 



2IO ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

impulse to place a kiss upon his brow. The liberty 
taken is immense, and the idea of gallantry here has 
undergone a transmutation which lifts it quite out of 
measurement by any scale or scruple of ours. I 
repeat that the plea is surely idle that the brothers 
are accomplished reporters to whom an enterprising 
newspaper would have found it worth while to pay 
a high salary ; for that cleverness, that intelligence, 
are simply the very standard by which we judge 
them. The betrayal of the Princess is altogether 
beyond us. 

Would Theophile Gautier feel that he is betrayed ? 
Probably not, for Theophile Gautier's feelings, as 
represented by MM. de Goncourt, were nothing if 
not eccentric, his judgment nothing if not perverse. 
His two friends say somewhere that the sign of his 
conversation was Fenormite dans le fiaradoxe. He 
certainly then would have risen to the occasion if it 
were a question of maintaining that his friends had 
rendered a service to his reputation. This to my 
mind is contestable, though their intention (at least 
in publishing their notes on him) was evidently to 
do so, for the greater part of his talk, as they repeat 
it, owes most of its relief to its obscenity. That is 
not fair to a man really clever — they should have 
given some other examples. But what strongly 
strikes us, however the service to Gautier may De 
estimated, is that they have rendered a questionable 
service to themselves. He is the finest mind in their 
pages, he is ever the object of their sympathy and 
applause. That is very graceful, but it enlightens 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 211 

us as to their intellectual perspective, and I say this 
with a full recollection of all that can be urged on 
Gautier's behalf. He was a charming genius, he was 
an admirable, a delightful writer. His vision was all 
his own and his brush was worthy of his vision. He 
knew the French color-box as well as if he had 
ground the pigments, and it may really be said of 
him that he did grind a great many of them. And 
yet with all this he is not one of the first, for his 
poverty of ideas was great. Le sultan de Vkpithete 
our authors call him, but he was not the emperor of 
thought. To be light is not necessarily a damning 
limitation. Who was lighter than Charles Lamb, for 
instance, and yet who was wiser for our immediate 
needs ? Gautier's defect is that he had veritably 
but one idea : he never got beyond the superstition 
that real literary greatness is to bewilder the bour- 
geois. Flaubert sat, intellectually, in the same ever- 
lasting twilight, and the misfortune is even greater 
for him, for his was the greater spirit. Gautier had 
other misfortunes as well — the struggle that never 
came to success, the want of margin, of time to do 
the best work, the conflict, in a hand-to-mouth, hack- 
neyed literary career, between splendid images and 
peculiarly sordid realities. Moreover, his paradoxes 
were usually genial and his pessimism was amiable 
— in the poetic glow of many of his verses and 
sketches you can scarcely tell it from optimism. All 
this makes us tender to his memory, but it does not 
blind us to the fact that MM. de Goncourt classify 
themselves when they show us that in the literary 



212 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

circle of their time they find him the most typical 
figure. He has the supreme importance, he looms 
largest and covers most ground. This leaves Gautier 
very much where he was, but it tickets his fastidious 
friends. 

" Theophile Gautier, who is here for some days, 
talks opera-dancers," they note in the summer of 
1868. " He describes the white satin shoe which, 
for each of them, is strengthened by a little cushion 
of silk in the places where the dancer feels that she 
bears and presses most ; a cushion which would in- 
dicate to an expert the name of the dancer. And 
observe that this work is always done by the dancer 
herself." I scarcely know why, but there is some- 
thing singularly characteristic in this last injunction 
of MM. de Goncourt, or of MM. de Goncourt and 
Theophile Gautier combined : " Et remarquez — !" 
The circumstance that a ballet-girl cobbles her shoes 
in a certain way has indeed an extreme significance. 
" Gautier begins to rejudge The Misanthrope, a 
comedy for a Jesuit college on the return from the 
holidays. Ah ! the pig — what a language ! it is ill- 
written !" And Gautier adds that he can't say this 
in print ; people would abuse him and it would take 
the bread out of his mouth. And then he falls foul 
of Louis XIV. " A hog, pockmarked like a colander, 
and short ! He was not five feet high, the great 
king. Always eating and — " My quotation is 
nipped in the bud : an attempt to reproduce Gau- 
tier's conversation in English encounters obstacles 
on the threshold. In this case we must burn pas- 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 213 

tilles even to read the rest of the sketch, and we 
cannot translate it at all. " Les bourgeois — why, 
the most enormous things go on chez les bourgeois" 
he remarks on another occasion. " I have had a 
glimpse of a few interiors. It is the sort of thing to 
make you veil your face." But again I must stop. 
M. Taine on this occasion courageously undertakes 
the defence of the bourgeois, of their decency, but 
M. Paul de Saint -Victor comes to Gautier's sup- 
port with an allusion impossible even to paraphrase, 
which apparently leaves those gentlemen in posses- 
sion of the field. The effort of our time has been, 
as we know, to disinter the details of history, to see 
the celebrities of the past, and even the obscure per- 
sons, in the small facts as well as in the big facts of 
their lives. In his realistic evocation of Louis XIV. 
Gautier was in agreement with this fashion ; the his- 
toric imagination operated in him by the light of the 
rest of his mind. But it is through the nose even 
more than through the eyes that it appears to have 
operated, and these flowers of his conversation sug- 
gest that, though he was certainly an animated talker, 
our wonder at such an anomaly as that MM. de Gon- 
court should apparently have sacrificed almost every 
one else to their estimate of him is not without its 
reasons. 

There are lights upon Flaubert's conversation 
which are somewhat of the same character (though 
not in every case) as those projected upon Gautier's. 
Gautier himself furnishes one of the most interesting 
of them when he mentions that the author of " Ma- 



214 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

dame Bovary " had said to him of a new book, " It 
is finished ; I have a dozen more pages to write, but 
I have the fall of every phrase." Flaubert had the 
religion of rhythm, and when he had caught the 
final cadence of each sentence — something that 
might correspond, in prose, to the rhyme — he filled 
in the beginning and middle. But Gautier makes 
the distinction that his rhythms were addressed 
above all to the ear (they were " mouthers," as the 
author of " Le Capitaine Fracasse " happily says); 
whereas those that he himself sought were ocular, 
not intended to be read aloud. There was no style 
worth speaking of for Flaubert but the style that 
required reading aloud to give out its value ; he 
mouthed his passages to himself. This was not in 
the least the sort of prose that MM. de Goncourt 
themselves cultivated. The reader of their novels 
will perceive that harmonies and cadences are noth- 
ing to them, and that their rhythms are, with a few 
rare exceptions, neither to be sounded nor to be 
seen. A page of " Madame Gervaisais," for instance, 
is an almost impossible thing to read aloud. Per- 
haps this is why poor Flaubert ended by giving on 
their nerves when on a certain occasion he invited 
them to come and listen to a manuscript. They 
could endure the structure of his phrase no longer, 
and they alleviate themselves in their diary. It ac- 
counts for the great difference between their treat- 
ment of him and their treatment of Gautier : they ac- 
cept the latter to the end, while with the author of 
" Salammbo " at a given moment they break down. 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 215 

It may appear that we have sacrificed MM. de 
Gcacourt's Journal, in contradiction to the spirit pro- 
fessed at the beginning of these remarks ; so that we 
must not neglect to give back with the other hand 
something presentable as the equivalent of what we 
have taken away. The truth is our authors are, in a 
very particular degree, specialists, and the element of 
which, as they would say, nous avons Vagacement in 
this autobiographic publication is largely the result 
of a disastrous attempt, undertaken under the cir- 
cumstances with a strangely good conscience, to be 
more general than nature intended them. Consti- 
tuted in a remarkable manner for receiving impres- 
sions of the external, and resolving them into pictures 
in which each touch looks fidgety, but produces none 
the less its effect — for conveying the suggestion (in 
many cases, perhaps in most, the derisive or the in- 
vidious suggestion) of scenes, places, faces, figures, 
objects, they have not been able to deny themselves 
in the page directly before us the indulgence of a 
certain yearning for the abstract, for conceptions and 
ideas. In this direction they are not happy, not gen- 
eral and serene ; they have a way of making large 
questions small, of thrusting in their petulance, of 
belittling even the religion of literature. Je vomis 
mes contemporains, one of them somewhere says, and 
there is always danger for them that an impression 
will act as an emetic. But when we meet them on 
their own ground, that of the perception of feature 
and exr ression, that of translation of the printed and 
published text of life, they are altogether admirable. 



2l6 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

It is mainly on this ground that we meet them in thr.ir 
novels, and the best pages of the Journal are those 
in which they return to it. There are, in fact, very 
few of these that do not contain some striking illus- 
tration of the way in which every combination of ob- 
jects about them makes a picture for them, and a pict- 
ure that testifies vividly to the life led in the midst of 
it. In the year 1853 they were legally prosecuted as 
authors of a so-called indecent article in a foolish lit- 
tle newspaper-, the prosecution was puerile,. and their 
acquittal was a matter of course. But they had to se- 
lect a defender, and they called upon a barrister who 
had been recommended to them as " safe." " In his 
drawing-room he had a flower-stand of which the foot 
consisted of a serpent in varnished wood climbing in 
a spiral up to a bird's nest. When I saw this flower- 
stand I felt a chill in my back. I guessed the sort of 
advocate that was to be our lot." The object, rare or 
common, has on every occasion the highest importance 
for them ; when it is rare it gives them their deepest 
pleasure, but when it is common it represents and 
signifies, and it is ever the thing that signifies most. 
Theophile Gautier's phrase about his own talent 
has attained a certain celebrity (" Critics have been 
so good as to reason about me overmuch — I am sim- 
ply a man for whom the visible world exists "), but 
MM. de Goncourt would have had every bit as good 
a right to utter it. People for whom the visible world 
doesn't " exist " are people with whom they have no 
manner of patience, and their conception of litera- 
ture is a conception of something in which such peo- 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 217 

pie have no part. Moreover, oddly enough, even as 
specialists they pay for their intensity by stopping 
short in certain directions ; the country is a consid- 
erable part of the visible world, but their Journal 
is full of little expressions of annoyance and disgust 
with it. What they like is the things they can do 
something with, and they can do nothing with woods 
and fields, nothing with skies that are not the ceiling 
of crooked streets or the " glimmering square " of 
windows. However, we must, of course, take men 
for what they have, not for what they have not, and 
the good faith of the two brothers is immensely fruit- 
ful when they project it upon their own little plot. 
What an amount of it they have needed, we exclaim 
as we read, to sustain them in such an attempt as 
" Madame Gervaisais " — an attempt to trace the con- 
version of a spirit from scepticism to Catholicism 
through contact with the old marbles and frescos, the 
various ecclesiastical bric-a-brac of Rome. Nothing 
could show less the expert, the habitual explorer of 
the soul than the purely pictorial plane of the demon- 
stration. Of the attitude of the soul itself, of the 
combinations, the agitations, of which it was trace- 
ably the scene, there are no picture and no notation 
at all. When the great spiritual change takes place 
for their heroine, the way in which it seems to the 
authors most to the purpose to represent it is by a 
wonderful description of the confessional, at the Gesii, 
to which she goes for the first time to kneel. A deep 
Christian mystery has been wrought within her, but 
the account of it in the novel is that 



2l8 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

' ' The confessional is beneath the mosaic of the choir, held 
and confined between the two supports carried by the heads of 
angels, with the shadow of the choir upon its brown wood, its 
little columns, its escutcheoned front, the hollow of its black- 
ness detaching itself dark from the yellow marble of the pilas- 
ters, from the white marble of the wainscot. It has two steps 
on the side for the knees of the penitent ; at the height for lean- 
ing a little square of copper trellis-work, in the middle of which 
the whisper of lips and the breath of sins has made a soiled, rusty 
circle ; and above this, in a poor black frame, a meagre print, 
under which is stamped Gesii muore in croce, and the glass of 
which receives a sort of gleam of blood from the flickering fire 
of a lamp suspended in the chapel beside it." 

The weakness of such an effort as " Madame Ger- 
vaisais" is that it has so much less authority as the 
history of a life than as the exhibition of a palette. 
On the other hand, it expresses some of the aspects 
of the most interesting city in the world with an art al- 
together peculiar, an art which is too much, in places, 
an appeal to our patience, but which says a hundred 
things to us about the Rome of our senses a hundred 
times better than we could have said them for our- 
selves. At the risk of seeming to attempt to make 
characterization an affair of as many combined and 
repeated touches as MM. de Goncourt themselves, 
or as the cumulative Sainte-Beuve, master of aggra- 
vation, I must add that their success, even where it 
is great, is greatest for those readers who are sub- 
missive to description and even to enumeration. The 
process, I say, is an appeal to our patience, and I have 
already hinted that the image, the evocation, is not im- 
mediate, as it is, for instance, with Guy de Maupas- 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT 219 

sant : our painters believe, above all, in shades, deal 
essentially with shades, have a horror of anything 
like rough delineation. They arrive at the -exact, the 
particular; but it is, above all, on a second reading 
that we see them arrive, so that they perhaps suffer a 
certain injustice from those who are unwilling to give 
more than a first. They select, but they see so much 
in things that even their selection contains a multi- 
plicity of items. The Journal, none the less, is full 
of aspects caught in the fact. In 1867 they make a 
stay in Auvergne, and their notes are perhaps pre- 
cisely the more illustrative from the circumstance 
that they find everything odious. 

"Return to Clermont. We go up and down the town. 
Scarcely a passer. The flat Sabbatical gloom of la province, to 
which is added here the mourning of the horrible stone of the 
country, the slate-stone of the Volvic, which resembles the stones 
of dungeons in the fifth act of popular melodramas. Here and 
there a campo which urges suicide, a little square with little point- 
ed paving-stones and the grass of the court of a seminary growing 
between them, where the dogs yawn as they pass. A church, the 
cathedral of colliers, black without, black within, a law-court, a 
black temple of justice, an Odeon-theatre of the law, academi- 
cally funereal, from which one drops into a public walk where the 
trees are so bored that they grow thin in the wide, mouldy shade. 
Always and everywhere the windows and doors bordered with 
black, like circulars conveying information of a demise. And 
sempiternally, on the horizon, that eternal Puy de Dome, whose 
bluish cone reminds one so, grocer - fashion, of a sugar-loaf 
wrapped in its paper." 

A complete account of MM. de Goncourt would 
not close without some consideration of the whole 



220 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

question of, I will not say the legitimacy, but the dis- 
cretion, of the attempt on the part of an artist whose 
vehicle is only collocations of words to be nothing if 
not plastic, to do the same things and achieve the 
same effects as the painter. Our authors offer an 
excellent text for a discourse on that theme, but I 
may not pronounce it, as I have not in these limits 
pretended to do more than glance in the direction of 
that activity in fiction on which they appear mainly 
to take their stand. The value of the endeavor I 
speak of will be differently rated according as peo- 
ple like to " see " as they read, and according as in 
their particular case MM. de Goncourt will appear 
to have justified by success a manner of which it is 
on every occasion to be said that it was handicapped 
at the start. My own idea would be that they have 
given this manner unmistakable life. They have had 
an observation of their own, which is a great thing, 
and it has made them use language in a light of their 
own. They have attempted an almost impossible feat 
of translation, but there are not many passages they 
have altogether missed. Those who feel the specta- 
cle as they feel it will always understand them enough, 
and any writer — even those who risk less — may be 
misunderstood by readers who have not that sympa- 
thy. Of course the general truth remains that if you 
wish to compete with the painter prose is a rounda- 
bout vehicle, and it is simpler to adopt the painter's 
tools. To this MM. de Goncourt would doubtless 
have replied that there is no use of words that is not 
an endeavor to "render," that lines of division are ar- 



JOURNAL OF THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT. 221 

rogant and arbitrary, that the point at which the pen 
should give way to the brush is a matter of apprecia- 
tion, that the only way to see what it can do, in cer- 
tain directions of ingenuity, is to try, and that they 
themselves have the merit of having tried and found 
out. What they have found out, what they show us, 
is not certainly of the importance that all the irri- 
tation, all the envy and uncharitableness of their 
Journal would seem to announce for compositions 
brought forth in such throes ; but the fact that they 
themselves make too much of their genius should not 
lead us to make too little. Artists will find it diffi- 
cult to forgive them for introducing such a confusion 
between aesthetics and ill-humor. That is compro- 
mising to the cause, for it tends to make the artistic 
spirit synonymous with the ungenerous. When one 
has the better thoughts one doesn't print the worse. 
We have never been ignorant of the fact that talent 
may be considerable even when character is peevish ; 
that is a mystery which we have had to accept. It 
is a poor reward for our philosophy that Providence 
should appoint MM. de Goncourt to insist upon the 
converse of the proposition during three substantial 
volumes. 



BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 

The lovers of a great poet are the people in the 
world who are most to be forgiven a little wanton 
fancy about him, for they have before them, in his 
genius and work, an irresistible example of the ap- 
plication of the imaginative method to a thousand 
subjects. Certainly, therefore, there are many con- 
firmed admirers of Robert Browning to whom it will 
not have failed to occur that the consignment of his 
ashes to the great temple of fame of the English 
race was exactly one of those occasions in which 
his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced and his 
irrepressible faculty for looking at human events in 
all sorts of slanting colored lights have found a 
signal opportunity. If he had been taken with it as 
a subject, if it had moved him to the confused yet 
comprehensive utterance of which he was the great 
professor, we can immediately guess at some of the 
sparks he would have scraped from it, guess how 
splendidly, in the case, the pictorial sense would 
have intertwined itself with the metaphysical. For 
such an occasion would have lacked, for the author 
of "The Ring and the Book," none of the complexity 
and convertibility that were dear to him. Passion 
and ingenuity, irony and solemnity, the impressive 



BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 223 

and the unexpected, would each have forced their 
way through ; in a word, the author would have been 
sure to take the special, circumstantial view (the in- 
veterate mark of all his speculation) even of so fore- 
gone a conclusion as that England should pay her 
greatest honor to one of her greatest poets. At any 
rate, as they stood in the Abbey on Tuesday last 
those of his admirers and mourners who were dis- 
posed to profit by his warrant for inquiring curiously, 
may well have let their fancy range, with its muffled 
step, in the direction which his fancy would proba- 
bly not have shrunk from following, even perhaps 
to the dim corners where humor and the whimsical 
lurk. Only, we hasten to add, it would have taken 
Robert Browning himself to render the multifold im- 
pression. 

One part of it on such an occasion is, of course, 
irresistible — the sense that these honors are the 
greatest that a generous nation has to confer, and 
that the emotion that accompanies them is one of 
the high moments of a nation's life. The attitude 
of the public, of the multitude, at such hours, is a 
great expansion, a great openness to ideas of as- 
piration and achievement ; the pride of possession 
and of bestowal, especially in the case of a career 
so complete as Mr. Browning's, is so present as to 
make regret a minor matter. We possess a great 
man most when we begin to look at him through 
the glass plate of death ; and it is a simple truth, 
though containing an apparent contradiction, that 
the Abbey never strikes us so benignantly as when 



2 24 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

we have a valued voice to commit to silence there. 
For the silence is articulate after all, and in worthy 
instances the preservation great. It is the other side 
of the question that would pull most the strings of 
irresponsible reflection — all those conceivable postu- 
lates and hypotheses of the poetic and satiric mind 
to which we owe the picture of how the bishop or- 
dered his tomb in St. Praxed's. Macaulay's " temple 
of silence and reconciliation " — and none the less 
perhaps because he himself is now a presence there 
— strikes us, as we stand in it, not only as local but 
as social — a sort of corporate company ; so thick, 
under its high arches, its dim transepts and chapels, 
is the population of its historic names and figures. 
They are a company in possession, with a high 
standard of distinction, of immortality, as it were ; 
for there is something serenely inexpugnable even in 
the position of the interlopers. As they look out, 
in the rich dusk, from the cold eyes of statues and 
the careful identity of tablets, they seem, with their 
converging faces, to scrutinize decorously the claims 
of each new. recumbent glory, to ask each other how 
he is to be judged as an accession. How difficult 
to banish the idea that Robert Browning would have 
enjoyed prefiguring and disintegrating the mystifica- 
tions, the reservations, even perhaps the slight buzz 
of scandal in the Poets' Corner, to which his own 
obsequies might give rise ! Would not his great 
relish, in so characteristic an interview with his cru- 
cible, have been his perception of the bewildering 
modernness, to much of the society, of the new 



BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 225 

candidate for a niche ? That is the interest and the 
fascination, from what may be termed the inside point 
of view, of Mr. Browning's having received, in this 
direction of becoming a classic, the only official as- 
sistance that is ever conferred upon English writers. 
It is as classics on one ground and another — 
some members of it perhaps on that of not being 
anything else — that the numerous assembly in the 
Abbey holds together, and it is as a tremendous 
and incomparable modern that the author of " Men 
and Women " takes his place in it. He introduces 
to his predecessors a kind of contemporary indi- 
vidualism which surely for many a year they had 
not been reminded of with any such force. The 
tradition of the poetic character as something high, 
detached, and simple, which may be assumed to have 
prevailed among them for a good while, is one that 
Browning has broken at every turn ; so that we can 
imagine his new associates to stand about him, till 
they have got used to him, with rather a sense of 
failing measures. A good many oddities and a good 
many great writers have been entombed in the Ab- 
bey ; but none of the odd ones have been so great 
and none of the great ones so odd. There are 
plenty of poets whose right to the title may be con- 
tested, but there is no poetic head of equal power 
— crowned and recrowned by almost importunate 
hands — from which so many people would withhold 
the distinctive wreath. All this will give the marble 
phantoms at the base of the great pillars and the 
definite personalities of the honorary slabs some- 

!5 



226 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

thing to puzzle out until, by the quick operation 
of time, the mere fact of his lying there among the 
classified and protected makes even Robert Brown- 
ing lose a portion of the bristling surface of his 
actuality. 

For the rest, judging from the outside and with 
his contemporaries, we of the public can only feel 
that his very modernness — by which we mean the 
all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work, permeated 
with accumulations and playing with knowledge — 
achieves a kind of conquest, or at least of extension, 
of the rigid pale. We cannot enter here upon any 
account either of that or of any other element of his 
genius, though surely no literary figure of our day 
seems to sit more unconsciously for the painter. 
The very imperfections of this original are fascinat- 
ing, for they never present themselves as weaknesses 
— they are boldnesses and overgrowths, rich rough- 
nesses and humors — and the patient critic need not 
despair of digging to the primary soil from which 
so many disparities and contradictions spring. He 
may finally even put his finger on some explanation 
of the great mystery, the imperfect conquest of the 
poetic form by a genius in which the poetic passion 
had such volume and range. He may successfully 
say how it was that a poet without a lyre — for 
that is practically Browning's deficiency : he had 
the scroll, but not often the sounding strings — was 
nevertheless, in his best hours, wonderfully rich in 
the magic of his art, a magnificent master of poetic 
emotion. He will justify on behalf of a multitude 



BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 227 

of devotees the great position assigned to a writer 
of verse of which the nature or the fortune has been 
(in proportion to its value and quantity) to be 
treated rarely as quotable. He will do all this and 
a great deal more besides ; but we need not wait for 
it to feel that something of our latest sympathies, 
our latest and most restless selves, passed the other 
day into the high part — the show-part, to speak 
vulgarly — of our literature. To speak of Mr. Brown- 
ing only as he was in the last twenty years of his 
life, how quick such an imagination as his would 
have been to recognize all the latent or mystical 
suitabilities that, in the last resort, might link to the 
great Valhalla by the Thames a figure that had be- 
come so conspicuously a figure of London ! He had 
grown to be intimately and inveterately of the Lon- 
don world ; he was so familiar and recurrent, so re- 
sponsive to all its solicitations, that, given the end- 
less incarnations he stands for to-day, he would have 
been missed from the congregation of worthies whose 
memorials are the special pride of the Londoner. 
Just as his great sign to those who knew him was 
that he was a force of health, of temperament, of 
tone, so what he takes into the Abbey is an immense 
expression of life — of life rendered with large liberty 
and free experiment, with an unprejudiced intellect- 
ual eagerness to put himself in other people's place, 
to participate in complications and consequences — 
a restlessness of psychological research that might 
well alarm any pale company for their formal ortho- 
doxies. 



2 28 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

But the illustrious whom he rejoins may be re- 
assured, as they will not fail to discover : in so far 
as they are representative it will clear itself up that, 
in spite of a surface unsuggestive of marble and a 
reckless individualism of form, he is quite as repre- 
sentative as any of them. For the great value of 
Browning is that at bottom, in all the deep spiritual 
and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the 
great tradition — is, with all his Italianisms and cos- 
mopolitanisms, all his victimization by societies or- 
ganized to talk about him, a magnificent example 
of the best and least dilettantish English spirit. 
That constitutes indeed the main chance for his 
eventual critic, who will have to solve the refreshing 
problem of how, if subtleties be not what the Eng- 
lish spirit most delights in, the author of, for in- 
stance, " Any Wife to Any Husband " made them his 
perpetual pasture and yet remained typically of his 
face. He was, indeed, a wonderful mixture of the 
universal and the alembicated. But he played with 
the curious and the special, they never submerged 
him, and it was a sign of his robustness that he 
could play to the end. His voice sounds loudest, 
and also clearest, for the things that, as a race, we 
like best — the fascination of faith, the acceptance of 
life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance 
of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity 
of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, 
above all, of the great human passion. If Browning 
had spoken for us in no other way, he ought to have 
been made sure of, tamed, and chained as a classic, 



BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 229 

on account of the extraordinary beauty of his treat- 
ment of the special relation between man and 
woman. It is a complete and splendid picture of 
the matter, which somehow places it at the same 
time in the region of conduct and responsibility. 
But when we talk of Robert Browning's speaking 
" for us," we go to the end of our privilege, we say 
all. With a sense of security, perhaps even a cer- 
tain complacency, we leave our sophisticated mod- 
ern conscience, and perhaps even our heterogeneous 
modern vocabulary, in his charge among the illus- 
trious. There will possibly be moments in which 
these things will seem to us to have widened the 
allowance, made the high abode more comfortable 
for some of those who are yet to enter it. 

1890 



HENRIK IBSEN 



ON THE OCCASION OF HEDDA GABLER 

Whether or no Henrik Ibsen be a master of his 
art, he has had a fortune that, in the English-speak- 
ing world, falls not always even to the masters — 
the fortune not only of finding himself the theme of 
many pens and tongues, but the rarer privilege and 
honor of acting as a sort of register of the critical 

| atmosphere, a barometer of the intellectual weather. 
Interesting or not in himself (the word on this point 
varies from the fullest affirmation to the richest de- 

, nial), he has sounded in our literary life a singu- 
larly interesting hour. At any rate, he himself con- 
stitutes an episode, an event, if the sign of such 
action be to have left appearances other than you 
found them. He has cleared up the air we breathe 
and set a copy to our renouncement ; has made 
many things wonderfully plain and quite mapped 
out the prospect. Whenever such service is ren- 
dered, the attentive spirit is the gainer ; these are 
its moments of amplest exercise. Illusions are sweet 
to the dreamer, but not so to the observer, who has 



HENRIK IBSEN 23 1 

a horror of a fool's paradise. Henrik Ibsen will 
have led him inexorably into the rougher road. Such 
recording and illuminating agents are precious ; they 
tell us where we are in the thickening fog of life, 
and we feel for them much of the grateful respect 
excited in us at sea, in dim weather, by the ex- 
hibition of the mysterious instrument with which 
the captain takes an observation. We have held 
Ghosts, or Rosmersholm, or Hedda Gabler in our 
hand, and they have been our little instrument — 
they have enabled us to emulate the wary mar- 
iner; the consequence of which is that we know 
at least on what shores we may ground or in what 
ports we may anchor. The author of these strange 
works has, in short, performed a function which was 
doubtless no part of his purpose. This was to tell 
us about his own people ; yet what has primarily 
happened is that he has brought about an exhibi- 
tion of ours. 

It is a truly remarkable show, for as to where nous 
en sommes, as the phrase goes,, in the art of criticism 
and the movement of curiosity, as to our accumula- 
tions of experience and our pliancy of intelligence, 
our maturity of judgment and our distinction of tone, 
our quick perception of quality and (peculiar glory i 
of our race) our fine feeling for shades, he has been 
the means of our acquiring the most copious infor- 
mation. Whether or no we may say that as a se- 
quel to this we know Dr. Ibsen better, we may at 
least say that we know more about ourselves. We 
glow with the sense of how we may definitely look 



232 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

to each other to take things, and that is an immense 
boon, representing in advance a wonderful economy 
of time, a saving of useless effort and vain ap- 
peal. The great clarifying fact has been that, with 
Hedda Gabler and Ghosts and all the rest, we have 

i stood in an exceptionally agitated way in the pres- 
ence of the work of art, and have gained thereby 
a peculiarly acute consciousness of how we tend to 
consider it. It has been interesting to perceive that 
we consider the work of art with passion, with some- 
thing approaching to fury. Under its influence we 

■ sweep the whole keyboard of emotion, from frantic 
enjoyment to ineffable disgust. Resentment and 
reprobation happen to have been indeed in the case 
before us the notes most frequently sounded ; but 
this is obviously an accident, not impairing the value 
of the illustration, the essence of which is that our 

i critical temper remains exactly the naif critical tem- 
per, the temper of the spectators in the gallery of 
the theatre who howl at the villain of the play. 

It has been the degree, in general, of the agita- 
tion that has been remarkable in the case before 
us, as may conveniently be gathered from a glance 
at the invaluable catalogue of denouncements drawn 
up by Mr. William Archer after perusal of the arti- 
cles lately dedicated by the principal London jour- 
nals to a couple of representations of Ibsen : that, 
if I mistake not, of Ghosts and that of Rosmers- 
holm. This catalogue is a precious document, 
one of those things that the attentive spirit would 
not willingly let die. It is a thing, at any rate, to 



HENRIK IBSEN 233 

be kept long under one's hand, as a mine of sug- 
gestion and reference ; for it illuminates, in this 
matter of the study of Ibsen, the second character- 
istic of our emotion (the first, as I have mentioned, 
being its peculiar intensity) : the fact that that emo- 
tion is conspicuously and exclusively moral, one of 
those cries of outraged purity which have so often 
and so pathetically resounded through the Anglo- 
Saxon world. 

We have studied our author, it must be admitted, 
under difficulties, for it is impossible to read him 
without perceiving that merely book in hand we but 
half know him — he addresses himself so substan- 
tially to representation. This quickens immensely 
our consideration for him, since in proportion as we 
become conscious that he has mastered an exceed- 
ingly difficult form are we naturally reluctant, in 
honor, to judge him unaccompanied by its advan- 
tages, by the benefit of his full intention. Consid- 
ering how much Ibsen has been talked about in 
England and America, he has been lamentably little 
seen and heard. Until Hedda Gabler was produced 
in London six weeks ago, there had been but one 
attempt to represent its predecessors that had con- 
sisted of more than a single performance. This 
circumstance has given a real importance to the un- 
dertaking of the two courageous young actresses 
who have brought the most recent of the author's 
productions to the light, and who have promptly 
found themselves justified in their talent as well as 
in their energy. It was a proof of Ibsen's force 



234 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

that he had made us chatter about him so profusely 
without the aid of the theatre ; but it was even more 
a blessing to have the aid at last. The stage is to 
the prose drama (and Ibsen's later manner is the 
very prose of prose) what the tune is to the song or 
the concrete case to the general law. It immedi- 
ately becomes apparent that he needs the test to 
show his strength and the frame to show his pict- 
ure. An extraordinary process of vivification takes 
place ; the conditions seem essentially enlarged. 
Those of the stage in general strike us for the most 
part as small enough, so that the game played in 
them is often not more inspiring than a successful 
sack-race. But Ibsen reminds us that if they do 
not in themselves confer life they can at least re- 
ceive it when the infusion is artfully attempted. Yet 
how much of it they were doomed to receive from 
Hedda Gabler was not to be divined till we had 
seen Hedda Gabler in the frame. The play, on 
perusal, left one comparatively muddled and mysti- 
fied, fascinated, but — in one's intellectual sympathy 
— snubbed. Acted, it leads that sympathy over the 
straightest of roads with all the exhilaration of a su- 
perior pace. Much more, I confess, one doesn't get 
from it ; but an hour of refreshing exercise is a 
reward in itself. The sense of being moved by a 
scientific hand as one sits in one's stall has not 
been spoiled for us by satiety. 

Hedda Gabler then, in the frame, is exceeding- 
ly vivid and curious, and a part of its interest is 
in the way it lights up in general the talent of the 



HENRIK IBSEN 235 

author. It is doubtless not the most complete of 
Ibsen's plays, for it owes less to its subject than 
to its form ; but it makes good his title to the pos- 
session of a real method, and in thus putting him 
before us as a master it exhibits at the same time 
his irritating, his bewildering incongruities. He is 
nothing, as a literary personality, if not positive ; 
yet there are moments when his great gift seems 
made up of negatives, or at any rate when the total 
seems a contradiction of each of the parts. I pre- 
mise, of course, that we hear him through a medium 
not his own, and I remember that translation is a 
shameless falsification of color. Translation, how- 
ever, is probably not wholly responsible for three 
appearances inherent in all his prose work, as we 
possess it, though in slightly differing degrees, and 
yet quite unavailing to destroy in it the expression 
of life ; I mean, of course, the absence of humor, the 
absence of free imagination, and the absence of 
style. The absence of style, both in the usual and 
in the larger sense of the word, is extraordinary, 
and all the more mystifying that its place is not 
usurped, as it frequently is in such cases, by vul- 
garity. Ibsen is massively common and " middle- 
class," but neither his spirit nor his manner is small. 
He is never trivial and never cheap, but he is 
in nothing more curious than in owing to a single 
source such distinction as he retains. His people 
are of inexpressive race ; they give us essentially the 
bourgeois impression ; even when they are furious- 
ly nervous and, like Hedda, more than sufficiently 



236 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

fastidious, we recognize that they live, with their 
remarkable creator, in a world in which selection 
has no great range. This is perhaps one reason 
why they none of them, neither the creator nor the 
creatures, appear to feel much impulse to play with 
the things of life. This impulse, when it breaks out, 
is humor, and in the scenic genius it usually breaks 
out in one place or another. We get the feeling, in 
Ibsen's plays, that such whims are too ultimate, too 
much a matter of luxury and leisure for the stage of 
feeling at which his characters have arrived. They 
are all too busy learning to live — humor will come 
in later, when they know how. A certain angular 
irony they frequently manifest, and some of his por- 
traits are strongly satirical, like that, to give only 
two instances, of Tesman, in Hedda Gabler (a play 
indeed suffused with irrepressible irony), or that of 
Hialmar Ekdal, in The Wild Duck. But it is the 
ridicule without the smile, the dance without the 
music, a sort of sarcasm that is nearer to tears than 
to laughter. There is nothing very droll in the 
world, I think, to Dr. Ibsen ; and nothing is more 
interesting than to see how he makes up his world 
without a joke. Innumerable are the victories of 
talent, and art is a legerdemain. 

It is always difficult to give an example of an ab- 
sent quality, and, if the romantic is even less present 
in Ibsen than the comic, this is best proved by the 
fact that everything seems to us inveterately observed. 
Nothing is more puzzling to the readers of his later 
work than the reminder that he is the great dramatic 



HENRIK IBSEN 237 

poet of his country, or that the author of The Pil- 
lars of Society is also the author of Brand and 
Peer Gynt, compositions which, we are assured, tes- 
tify to an audacious imagination and abound in com- 
plicated fantasy. In his satiric studies of contem- 
porary life, the impression that is strongest with us 
is that the picture is infinitely noted, that all the pa- 
tience of the constructive pessimist is in his love of 
the detail of character and of conduct, in his way of 
accumulating the touches that illustrate them. His 
recurrent ugliness of surface, as it were, is a sort of 
proof of his fidelity to the real in a spare, strenuous, 
democratic community; just as the same peculiarity 
is one of the sources of his charmless fascination — a 
touching vision of strong forces struggling with a 
poverty, a bare provinciality, of life. I call the fasci- 
nation of Ibsen charmless (for those who feel it at 
all), because he holds us without bribing us ; he 
squeezes the attention till he almost hurts it, yet with 
never a conciliatory stroke. He has as little as pos- 
sible to say to our taste ; even his large, strong form 
takes no account of that, gratifying it without conces- 
sions. It is the oddity of the mixture that makes him 
so individual — his perfect practice of a difficult and 
delicate art, combined with such aesthetic density. 
Even in such a piece as The Lady from the Sea 
(much the weakest, to my sense, of the whole series), 
in which he comes nearer than in others — unless 
indeed it be in Hedda Gabler — to playing with an 
idea from the simple instinct of sport, nothing could 
be less picturesque than the general effect, with every 



238 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

inherent incentive to have made it picturesque. The 
idea might have sprung from the fancy of Hawthorne, 
but the atmosphere is the hard light of Ibsen. One 
feels that the subject should have been tinted and 
distanced ; but, in fact, one has to make an atmos- 
phere as one reads, and one winces considerably 
under Doctor Wangel and the pert daughters. 

For readers without curiosity as to their author's 
point of view (and it is doubtless not a crime not 
to have it, though I think it is a misfortune, an 
open window the less), there is too much of Doctor 
Wangel in Ibsen altogether — using the good gentle- 
man's name for what it generally represents or con- 
notes. It represents the ugly interior on which his 
curtain inexorably rises, and which, to be honest, I 
like for the queer associations it has taught us to re- 
spect : the hideous carpet and wall-paper and cur- 
tains (one may answer for them), the conspicuous 
stove, the lonely centre-table, the " lamps with green 
shades," as in the sumptuous first act of The Wild 
Duck, the pervasive air of small interests and stand- 
ards, the sign of limited local life. It represents the 
very clothes, the inferior fashions, of the figures that 
move before us, and the shape of their hats and the 
tone of their conversation and the nature of their 
diet. But the oddest thing happens in connection 
with this effect — the oddest extension of sympathy or 
relaxation of prejudice. What happens is that we feel 
that whereas, if Ibsen were weak or stupid or vulgar, 
this parochial or suburban stamp would only be a 
stick to beat him with ; it acts, as the case stands, and 



HENRIK IBSEN 239 

in the light of his singular masculinity, as a sort of 
substitute — a little clumsy, if you like — for charm. 
In a word, it becomes touching, so that practically the 
blase critical mind enjoys it as a refinement. What 
occurs is very analogous to what occurs in our ap- 
preciation of the dramatist's remarkable art, his ad- 
mirable talent for producing an intensity of interest 
by means incorruptibly quiet, by that almost demure 
preservation of the appearance of the usual in which 
we see him juggle with difficulty and danger and 
which constitutes, as it were, his only coquetry. 
There are people who are indifferent to these mild 
prodigies ; there are others for whom they will always 
remain the most charming privilege of art. 

Hedda Gabler is doubtless as suburban as any 
of its companions-, which is indeed a fortunate cir- 
cumstance, inasmuch as if it were less so we should 
be deprived of a singularly complete instance of a 
phenomenon difficult to express, but which may per- 
haps be described as the operation of talent without 
glamour. There is notoriously no glamour over the 
suburbs, and yet nothing could be more vivid than 
Dr. Ibsen's account of the incalculable young woman 
into whom Miss Robins so artistically projects her- 
self. To "like" the play, as we phrase it, is doubt- 
less therefore to give one of the fullest examples of 
our constitutional inability to control our affections. 
Several of the spectators who have liked it most will 
probably admit even that, with themselves, this senti- 
ment has preceded a complete comprehension. They 
would perhaps have liked it better if they had under- 



240 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

stood it better — as to this they are not sure ; but 
they at any rate liked it well enough. Well enough 
for what? the question may of course always be in 
such a case. To be absorbed, assuredly, which is 
the highest tribute we can pay to any picture of life, 
and a higher one than most pictures attempted suc- 
ceed in making us pay. Ibsen is various, and Hed- 
da Gabler is probably an ironical pleasantry, the ar- 
tistic exercise of a mind saturated with the vision of 
human infirmities ; saturated, above all, with a sense 
of the infinitude, for all its mortal savor, of char- 
acter, finding that an endless romance and a perpet- 
ual challenge. Can there have been at the source of 
such a production a mere refinement of conscious 
power, an enjoyment of difficulty, and a preconceived 
victory over it ? We are free to imagine that in this 
case Dr. Ibsen chose one of the last subjects that an 
expert might have been expected to choose, for the 
harmless pleasure of feeling and of showing that he 
was in possession of a method that could make up 
for its deficiencies. 

The demonstration is complete and triumphant, 
but it does not conceal from us — on the contrary — 
that his drama is essentially that supposedly undra- 
matic thing, the picture not of an action but of a con- 
dition. It is the portrait of a nature, the story of 
what Paul Bourget would call an Hat d'dme, and of a 
state of nerves as well as of soul, a state of temper, 
of health, of chagrin, of despair. Hedda Gabler is, 
' in short, the study of an exasperated woman ; and it 
may certainly be declared that the subject was not 



HENRIK IBSEN 24.I 

in advance, as a theme for scenic treatment, to be 
pronounced promising. There could in fact, however, 
be no more suggestive illustration of the folly of quar- 
relling with an artist over his subject. Ibsen has had 
only to take hold of this one in earnest to make it, 
against every presumption, live with an intensity of 
life. One can doubtless imagine other ways, but it is 
enough to say of this one that, put to the test, it im- 
poses its particular spectacle. Something might have 
been gained, entailing perhaps a loss in another di- 
rection, by tracing the preliminary stages, showing 
the steps in Mrs. Tesman's history which led to the 
spasm, as it were, on which the curtain rises and of 
which the breathless duration — ending in death — is 
the period of the piece. But a play is above every- 
thing a work of selection, and Ibsen, with his curious 
and beautiful passion for the unity of time (carried 
in him to a point which almost always implies also 
that of place), condemns himself to admirable rigors. 
We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we 
ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply 
find them in her character. Her motives are just 
her passions. What the four acts show us is these 
motives and that character — complicated, strange, ir- 
reconcilable, infernal — playing themselves out. We 
know too little why she married Tesman, we see too 
little why she ruins Lovborg ; but we recognize that 
she is infinitely perverse, and Heaven knows that, as 
the drama mostly goes, the crevices we are called 
upon to stop are singularly few. That Mrs. Tesman 
is a perfectly ill - regulated person is a matter of 
16 



242 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

course, and there are doubtless spectators who would 
fain ask whether it would not have been better to 
represent in her stead a person totally different. The 
answer to this sagacious question seems to me to be 
simply that no one can possibly tell. There are 
many things in the world that are past finding out, 
and one of them is whether the subject of a work had 
not better have been another subject. We shall al- 
ways do well to leave that matter to the author {lie 
may have some secret for solving the riddle) ; so ter- 
rible would his revenge easily become if we were to 
accept a responsibility for his theme. 

The distinguished thing is the firm hand that 
weaves the web, the deep and ingenious use made of 
the material. What material, indeed, the dissentient 
spirit may exclaim, and what " use," worthy of the 
sacred name, is to be made of a wicked, diseased, dis- 
agreeable woman ? That is just what Ibsen attempts 
to gauge, and from the moment such an attempt is 
resolute the case ceases to be so simple. The " use " 
of Hedda Gabler is that she acts on others and that 
even her most disagreeable qualities have the privi- 
lege, thoroughly undeserved doubtless, but equally ir- 
resistible, of becoming a part of the history of others. 
And then one isn't so sure she is wicked, and by no 
means sure (especially when she is represented by an 
actress who makes the point ambiguous) that she is 
disagreeable. She is various and sinuous and grace- 
ful, complicated and natural ; she suffers, she strug- 
gles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a 
dozen interpretations, to the importunity of our sus- 



HENRIK IBSEN 243 

pense. Wrought with admirable closeness is the 
whole tissue of relations between the five people 
whom the author sets in motion and on whose behalf 
he asks of us so few concessions. That is for the 
most part the accomplished thing in Ibsen, the thing 
that converts his provincialism into artistic urbanity. 
He puts us to no expense worth speaking of — he 
takes all the expense himself. I mean that he thinks 
out our entertainment for us and shapes it of think- 
able things, the passions, the idiosyncrasies, the cu- 
pidities and jealousies, the strivings and struggles, 
the joys and sufferings of men. The spectator's sit- 
uation is different enough when what is given him is 
the mere dead rattle of the surface of life, into which 
he has to inject the element of thought, the "hu- 
man interest." Ibsen kneads the soul of man like a 
paste, and often with a rude and indelicate hand to 
which the soul of man objects. Such a production as 
The Pillars of Society, with its large, dense complexity 
of moral cross-references and its admirable definite- 
ness as a picture of motive and temperament (the 
whole canvas charged, as it were, with moral color), 
such a production asks the average moral man to see 
too many things at once. It will never help Ibsen 
with the multitude that the multitude shall feel that 
the more it looks the more intentions it shall see, 
for of such seeing of many intentions the multi- 
tude is but scantily desirous. It keeps indeed a pos- 
itively alarmed and jealous watch in that direction ; it 
smugly insists that intentions shall be rigidly limited. 
This sufficiently answers the artless question of 



244 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

whether it may be hoped for the author of The 
Pillars of Society that he shall acquire popularity in 
this country. In what country under heaven might 
it have been hoped for him, or for the particular 
community, that he should acquire popularity? Is 
he, in point of fact, so established and cherished 
in the Norwegian theatre? Do his countrymen un- 
derstand him and clamor for him and love him, or 
do they content themselves — a very different affair — 
with being proud of him when aliens abuse him? 
The rumor reaches us that Hedda Gabler has found 
no favor at Copenhagen, where we are compelled 
to infer that the play had not the happy interpreta- 
tion it enjoys in London. It would doubtless have 
been in danger here if tact and sympathy had not 
interposed. We hear that it has had reverses in 
Germany, where of late years Ibsen has been the 
fashion ; but, indeed, all these are matters of an 
order as to which we should have been grateful for 
more information from those who have lately had the 
care of introducing the formidable dramatist to the 
English and American public. He excites, for exam- 
ple, in each case, all sorts of curiosity and conject- 
ure as to the quality and capacity of the theatre to 
which, originally, such a large order was addressed ; 
we are full of unanswered questions about the audi- 
ence and the school. 

What, however, has most of all come out in our 
timid and desultory experiments is that the author 
of The Pillars of Society and of The DoWs House, 
of Ghosts, of The Wild Duck, of Hedda Gabler, is 



HENRIK IBSEN 245 

destined to be adored by the "profession." Even 
in his comfortless borrowed habit he will remain 
intensely dear to the actor and the actress. He 
cuts them out work to which the artistic nature in 
them joyously responds — work difficult and interest- ' 
ing, full of stuff and opportunity. The opportunity 
that he gives them is almost always to do the deep 
and delicate thing — the sort of chance that, in pro- 
portion as they are intelligent, they are most on the 
lookout for. He asks them to paint with a fine 
brush ; for the subject that he gives them is ever 
our plastic humanity. This will surely preserve him 
(leaving out the question of serious competition) af- 
ter our little flurry is over. It was what made the 
recent representation of Hedda Gabler so singularly 
interesting and refreshing. It is what gives im- 
portance to the inquiry as to how his call for "sub- 
tlety" in his interpreters has been met in his own 
country. It was impossible the other day not to be 
conscious of a certain envy (as of a case of artistic 
happiness) of the representatives of the mismated 
Tesmans and their companions — so completely, as 
the phrase is, were they "in" it and under the charm 
of what they had to do. In fact, the series of Ibsen's 
" social dramas " is a dazzling array of parts. Nora 
Helmer will be undertaken again and again — of a 
morning, no doubt, as supposedly, though oddly, the 
more " earnest " hour — by young artists justly infatu- 
ated. The temptation is still greater to women than 
to men, as we feel in thinking, further, of the Re- 
becca of Rosmersholm;oi Lona Hessel and Martha 



246 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Bernick, in the shapely Pillars ;of the passionate 
mother and the insolent maid, in the extraordinarily 
compact and vivid Ghosts — absurd and fascinating 
work; of Mrs. Linden, so quietly tragic, so trem- 
ulously real, in The Doll's House and of that ir- 
resistibly touching image, so untainted with cheap 
pathos, Hedvig Ekdal, the little girl with failing eyes, 
in The Wild Duck who pores over her story-book 
in the paltry photographic studio of her intensely 
humbugging father. Such a figure as this very Hial- 
mar Ekdal, however, the seedy, selfish — subtly selfish 
and self-deceptive — photographer, in whom nothing 
is active but the tongue, testifies for the strong mas- 
culine side of the list. If The League of Youth is 
more nearly a complete comedy than any other of 
Ibsen's prose works, the comedian who should at- 
tempt to render Stensgard in that play would have a 
real portrait to reproduce. But the examples are nu- 
merous : Bernick and Rosmer, Oswald and Manders 
(Ibsen's compunctious "pastors" are admirable), Gre- 
gers Werle, the transcendent meddler in The Wild 
Duck Rorlund, the prudish rector in the Pillars, 
Stockmann and the Burgomaster in The Enemy of 
the People, all stand, humanly and pictorially, on 
their feet. 

This it is that brings us back to the author's great 
quality, the quality that makes him so interesting in 
spite of his limitations, so rich in spite of his lapses 
— his habit of dealing essentially with the individual 
caught in the fact. Sometimes, no doubt, he leans 
too far on that side, loses sight too much of the type- 



HENRIK IBSEN 247 

quality, and gives his spectators free play to say that 
even caught in the fact his individuals are mad. We 
are not at all sure, for instance, of the type-quality in 
Hedda. Sometimes he makes so queer a mistake as 
to treat a pretty motive, like that of The Lady from 
the Sea, in a poor and prosaic way. He exposes 
himself with complacent, with irritating indifference 
to the objector as well as to the scoffer, he makes his 
"heredity " too short and his consequences too long, 
he deals with a homely and unsesthetic society, he 
harps on the string of conduct, and he actually talks 
of stockings and legs, in addition to other improprie- 
ties. He is not pleasant enough nor light enough 
nor casual enough ; he is too far from Piccadilly and ■ 
our glorious standards. Therefore his cause may be 
said to be lost ; we shall never take him to our hearts. 
It was never to have been expected, indeed, that we 
should, for in literature religions usually grow their 
own gods, and our heaven — as every one can see — is 
already crowded. But for those who care in general 
for the form that he has practised he will always re- 
main one of the talents that have understood it best 
and extracted most from it, have effected most neatly 
the ticklish transfusion of life. If we possessed the 
unattainable, an eclectic, artistic, disinterested thea- 
tre, to which we might look for alternation and va- 
riety, it would simply be a point of honor in such a 
temple to sacrifice sometimes to Henrik Ibsen. 



248 . ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

II 

ON THE OCCASION OF THE MASTER-BUILDER 

In spite of its having been announced in many 
quarters that Ibsen would never do, we are still to 
have another chance, which may very well not be 
the last, of judging the question for ourselves. Not 
only has the battered Norseman had, in the evening 
of his career, the energy to fling yet again into the 
arena one of those bones of contention of which he 
has in an unequalled degree the secret of possessing 
himself, but practised London hands have been able 
to catch the mystic missile in its passage and are 
flourishing it, as they have flourished others, before 
our eyes. In addition to an opportunity of reading 
the play, I have had the pleasure of seeing a rehear- 
sal of the performance — so that I already feel some- 
thing of responsibility of that inward strife which is 
' an inevitable heritage of all inquiring contact with 
the master. It is perhaps a consequence of this 
irremediable fever that one should recklessly court 
1 the further responsibility attached to uttering an im- 
pression into which the premature may partly enter. 
But it is impossible, in any encounter with Ibsen, to 
resist the influence of at least the one kind of interest 
that he exerts at the very outset, and to which at the 
present hour it may well be a point of honor promptly 
to confess one's subjection. This immediate kind is 
the general interest we owe to the refreshing circum- 
stance that he at any rate gives us the sense of life, 



HENRIK IBSEN - 249 

and the practical effect of which, is ever to work a 
more or less irritating spell. The other kind is the 
interest of the particular production, a varying quan- 
tity and an agreeable source of suspense — a happy 
occasion, in short, for that play of intelligence, that 
acuteness of response, whether in assent or in pro- 
test, which it is the privilege of the clinging theatre- 
goer to look forward to as a result of the ingenious 
dramatist's appeal, but his sad predicament, for the 
most part, to miss yet another and another chance to 
achieve. With Ibsen (and that is the exceptional 
joy, the bribe to rapid submission) we can always 
count upon the chance. Our languid pulses quick- 
en as we begin to note the particular direction taken 
by the attack on a curiosity inhabiting, by way of a 
change, the neglected region of the brain. 

In The Master- Builder this emotion is not only 
kindled very early in the piece — it avails itself to the 
full of the right that Ibsen always so liberally con- 
cedes it of being still lively after the piece is over. 
His independence, his perversity, his intensity, his 
vividness, the hard compulsion of his strangely in- 
scrutable art, are present in full measure, together 
with that quality which comes almost uppermost 
when it is a question of seeing him on the stage, 
his peculiar blessedness to actors. Their reasons for 
liking him it would not be easy to overstate ; and, 
surely, if the public should ever completely renounce 
him, players enamoured of their art will still be found 
ready to interpret him for that art's sake to empty 
benches. No dramatist of our time has had more 



250 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

the secret, and has kept it better, of making their 
work interesting to them. The subtlety with which 
he puts them into relation to it eludes analysis, but 
operates none the less strongly as an incitement. 
Does it reside mainly in the way he takes hold of 
their imagination, or in some special affinity with 
their technical sense ; in what he gives them, or in 
what he leaves it to them to give ; in the touches by 
which the moral nature of the character opens out a 
vista for them, or in the simple fact of connection 
with such a vivified whole ? These are questions, at 
any rate, that Mr. Herbert Waring, Miss Robins, 
Miss Moodie, enviable with their several problems, 
doubtless freely ask themselves, or even each other, 
while the interest and the mystery of The Master- 
Builder fold them more and more closely in. What 
is incontestable is the excitement, the amusement, 
the inspiration of dealing with material so solid and 
so fresh. The very difficulty of it makes a common 
cause, as the growing ripeness of -preparation makes 
a common enthusiasm. 

I shall not attempt to express the subject of the 
play more largely than to say that its three acts deal 
again, as Ibsen is so apt to deal, with the supremely 
critical hour in the life of an individual, in the his- 
tory of a soul. The individual is in this case not a 
Hedda nor a Nora nor a Mrs. Alving nor a Lady 
from the Sea, but a prosperous architect of Chris- 
tiania, who, on reaching a robust maturity, encoun- 
ters his fate all in the opening of a door. This fate 
— infinitely strange and terrible, as we know before 



HENRIK IBSEN 25 1 

the curtain falls — is foreshadowed in Miss Elizabeth 
Robins, who, however, in passing the threshold, lets 
in a great deal more than herself, represents a hero- 
ine conceived, as to her effect on the action, with 
that shameless originality which Ibsen's contemners 
call wanton and his admirers call fascinating. Hilde 
Wangel, a young woman whom the author may well 
be trusted to have made more mystifying than her 
curiously charmless name would suggest, is only the 
indirect form, the animated clock-face, as it were, of 
Halvard Solness's destiny ; but the action, in spite 
of obscurities and ironies, takes its course by steps 
none the less irresistible. The mingled reality and 
symbolism of it all give us an Ibsen within an Ibsen. 
His subject is always, like the subjects of all first- 
rate men, primarily an idea ; but in this case the idea 
is as difficult to catch as its presence is impossible to 
overlook. The whole thing throbs and flushes with 
it, and yet smiles and mocks at us through it as if in 
conscious supersubtlety. The action, at any rate, is 
superficially simple, more single and confined than 
that of most of Ibsen's other plays ; practically, as 
it defines itself and rises to a height, it leaves the 
strange, doomed Solness, and the even stranger ap- 
parition of the joyous and importunate girl (the one 
all memories and hauntings and bondages, the other 
all health and curiosity and youthful insolence) face 
to face on unprecedented terms — terms, however, I 
hasten to add, that by no means prevent the play 
from being one to which a young lady, as they say in 
Paris, may properly take her mother. Of all Ibsen's 



252 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

heroines Hilde is, indeed, perhaps at once the most 
characteristic of the author and the most void of of- 
fence to the "general." If she has notes that recall 
Hedda, she is a Hedda dangerous precisely because 
she is not yet blas'ee — a Hedda stimulating, fully benef- 
icent in intention ; in short, " reversed," as I believe 
the author defined her to his interpreters. From her 
encounter with Halvard Solness many remarkable 
things arise, but most of all perhaps the spectator's 
sense of the opportunity offered by the two rare parts ; 
and in particular of the fruitful occasion (for Solness 
from beginning to end holds the stage) seized by Mr. 
Herbert Waring, who has evidently recognized one 
of those hours that actors sometimes wait long years 
for — the hour that reveals a talent to itself as well 
as to its friends, and that makes a reputation take 
a bound. Whatever, besides refreshing them, The 
Master -Builder does for Ibsen with London play- 
goers, it will render the service that the curious little 
Norwegian repertory has almost always rendered the 
performers, even to the subsidiary figures, even to the 
touching Kaia, the touching Ragnar, the inevitable 
Dr. Herdal, and the wasted wife of Solness, so care- 
fully composed by Miss Moodie. 

1891-1893. 



MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 



An observer of manners, called upon to name to- 
day the two things that make it most completely 
different from yesterday (by which I mean a toler- 
ably recent past), might easily be conceived to 
mention in the first place the immensely greater 
conspicuity of the novel, and in the second the im- 
mensely greater conspicuity of the attitude of women. 
He might perhaps be supposed even to go on to 
add that the attitude of women is the novel, in Eng- 
land and America, and that these signs of the times 
have therefore a practical unity. The union is rep- 
resented, at any rate, in the high distinction of Mrs. 
Humphry Ward, who is at once the author of the 
work of fiction that has in our hour been most 
widely circulated and the most striking example of 
the unprecedented kind of attention which the femi- 
nine mind is now at liberty to excite. Her position 
is one which certainly ought to soothe a myriad 
discontents, to show the superfluity of innumerable 
agitations. No agitation, on the platform or in the 
newspaper, no demand for a political revolution, 
ever achieved anything like the publicity or roused 
anything like the emotion of the earnest attempt of 



254 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

this quiet English lady to tell an interesting story, 
to present an imaginary case. " Robert Elsmere," 
in the course of a few weeks, put her name in the 
mouths of the immeasurable English-reading multi- 
tude. The book was not merely an extraordinarily 
successful novel ; it was, as reflected in contempo- 
rary conversation, a momentous public event. 

No example could be more interesting of the way 
in which women, after prevailing for so many ages in 
our private history, have begun to be unchallenged 
contributors to our public. Very surely and not at 
all slowly the effective feminine voice makes its in- 
genious hum the very ground-tone of the uproar in 
which the conditions of its interference are discussed. 
So many presumptions against this interference have 
fallen to the ground that it is difficult to say which 
of them practically remain. In England to-day, and 
in the United States, no one thinks of asking whether 
or no a book be by a woman, so completely, to the 
Anglo-American sense, has the tradition of the dif- 
ference of dignity between the sorts been lost. In 
France the tradition flourishes, but literature in 
France has a different perspective and another air. 
Among ourselves, I hasten to add, and without in 
the least undertaking to go into the question of the 
gain to literature of the change, the position achieved 
by the sex formerly overshadowed has been a well- 
fought battle, in which that sex has again and again 
returned to the charge. In other words, if women 
take up (in fiction for instance) an equal room in 
the public eye, it is because they have been re- 



MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 255 

markably clever. They have carried the defences 
line by line, and they may justly pretend that they 
have at last made the English novel speak their 
language. The history of this achievement will, of 
course, not be completely written unless a chapter 
be devoted to the resistance of the men. It would 
probably then come out that there was a possible 
form of resistance, of the value of which the men 
were unconscious — a fact that indeed only proves 
their predestined weakness. 

This weakness finds itself confronted with the 
circumstance that the most serious, the most deliber- 
ate, and most comprehensive attempt made in Eng- 
land in this later time to hold the mirror of prose 
fiction up to life has not been made by one of the 
hitherto happier gentry. There may have been works, 
in this line, of greater genius, of a spirit more instinc- 
tive and inevitable, but I am at a loss to name one 
of an intenser intellectual energy. It is impossible 
to read " Robert Elsmere " without feeling it to be 
an exceedingly matured conception, and it is difficult 
to attach the idea of conception at all to most of the 
other novels of the hour ; so almost invariably do 
they seem to have come into the world only at the 
hour's notice, with no pre-natal history to speak of. 
Remarkably interesting is the light that Mrs. Ward's 
celebrated study throws upon the expectations we 
are henceforth entitled to form of the critical faculty 
in women. The whole complicated picture is a slow, 
expansive evocation, bathed in the air of reflection, 
infinitely thought out and constructed, not a flash of 



256 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

perception nor an arrested impression. It suggests 
the image of a large, slow-moving, slightly old-fash- 
ioned ship, buoyant enough and well out of water, 
but with a close-packed cargo in every inch of 
stowage-room. One feels that the author has set 
afloat in it a complete treasure of intellectual and 
moral experience, the memory of all her contacts 
and phases, all her speculations and studies. 

Of the ground covered by this broad-based story 
the largest part, I scarcely need mention, is the 
ground of religion, the ground on which it is re- 
puted to be most easy to create a reverberation in 
the Anglo-Saxon world. " Easy " here is evidently 
easily said, and it must be noted that the greatest 
reverberation has been the product of the greatest 
talent. It is difficult to associate " Robert Elsmere " 
with any effect cheaply produced. The habit of 
theological inquiry (if indeed the term inquiry may 
be applied to that which partakes of the nature 
rather of answer than of question) has long been 
rooted in the English - speaking race ; but Mrs. 
Ward's novel would not have had so great a fortune 
had she not wrought into it other bribes than this. 
She gave it indeed the general quality of charm, and 
she accomplished the feat, unique so far as I re- 
member in the long and usually dreary annals of 
the novel with a purpose, of carrying out her pur- 
pose without spoiling her novel. The charm that 
was so much wind in the sails of her book was a 
combination of many things, but it was an element 
in which culture — using the term in its largest sense 



MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 257 

— had perhaps most to say. Knowledge, curiosity, 
acuteness, a critical faculty remarkable in itself and 
very highly trained, the direct observation of life 
and the study of history, strike the reader of " Rob- 
ert Elsmere" — rich and representative as it is — as 
so many strong savors in a fine moral ripeness, a 
genial, much -seeing wisdom. Life, for Mrs. Hum- 
phry Ward, as the subject of a large canvas, means 
predominantly the life of the thinking, the life of 
the sentient creature, whose chronicler at the present 
hour, so little is he in fashion, it has been almost an 
originality on her part to become. The novelist is 
often reminded that he must put before us an ac- 
tion ; but it is, after all, a question of terms. There 
are actions and actions, and Mrs. Ward was Capable 
of recognizing possibilities of palpitation without 
number in that of her hero's passionate conscience, 
that of his restless faith. Just so in her admirable 
appreciation of the strange and fascinating Amiel, 
she found in his throbbing stillness a quantity of life 
that she would not have found in the snapping of 
pistols. 

This attitude is full of further assurance ; it gives 
us a grateful faith in the independence of view of the 
new work which she is believed lately to have brought 
to completion and as to which the most absorbed of 
her former readers will wish her no diminution of the 
skill that excited, on behalf of adventures and situa- 
tions essentially spiritual, the suspense and curiosity 
that they had supposed themselves to reserve for 
mysteries and solutions on quite another plane. 
17 



258 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

There are several considerations that make Mrs. 
Ward's next study of acute contemporary states as 
impatiently awaited as the birth of an heir to great 
possessions ; but not the least of them is the supreme 
example its fortune, be it greater or smaller, will offer 
of the spell wrought to-day by the wonderful art of 
fiction. Could there be a greater proof at the same 
time of that silent conquest that I began by speaking 
of, the way in which, pen in hand, the accomplished 
sedentary woman has come to represent with an 
authority widely recognized the multitudinous, much- 
entangled human scene ? I must in conscience add 
that it has not yet often been given to her to do so 
with the number of sorts of distinction, the educated 
insight, the comprehensive ardor of Mrs. Humphry 
Ward. 

1891. 



CRITICISM 

If literary criticism may be said to flourish among 
us at all, it certainly flourishes immensely, for it 
flows through the periodical press like a river that 
has burst its dikes. The quantity of it is pro- 
digious, and it is a commodity of which, however 
the demand may be estimated, the supply will be 
sure to be in any supposable extremity the last thing 
to fail us. What strikes the observer above all, in 
such an affluence, is the unexpected proportion the 
discourse uttered bears to the objects discoursed of 
— the paucity of examples, of illustrations and pro- 
ductions, and the deluge of doctrine suspended in 
the void ; the profusion of talk and the contraction 
of experiment, of what one may call literary conduct. 
This, indeed, ceases to be an anomaly as soon as we 
look at the conditions of contemporary journalism. 
Then we see that these conditions have engendered 
the practice of " reviewing " — a practice that in 
general has nothing in common with the art of crit- 
icism. Periodical literature is a huge, open mouth 
which has to be fed — a vessel of immense capac- 
ity which has to be filled. It is like a regular train 
which starts at an advertised hour, but which is free 
to start only if every seat be occupied. The seats 



260 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

are many, the train is ponderously long, and hence 
the manufacture of dummies for the seasons when 
there are not passengers enough. A stuffed man- 
nikin is thrust into the empty seat, where it makes 
a creditable figure till the end of the journey. It 
looks sufficiently like a passenger, and you know it 
is not one only when you perceive that it neither 
says anything nor gets out, The guard attends to 
it when the train is shunted, blows the cinders from 
its wooden face and gives a different crook to its 
elbow, so that it may serve for another run. In this 
way, in a well-conducted periodical, the blocks of 
remplissage are the dummies of criticism — the recur- 
rent, regulated breakers in the tide of talk. They 
have a reason for being, and the situation is simpler 
when we perceive it. It helps to explain the dispro- 
portion I just mentioned, as well, in many a case, as 
the quality of the particular discourse. It helps us 
to understand that the " organs of public opinion " 
must be no less copious than punctual, that publicity 
must maintain its high standard, that ladies and 
gentlemen may turn an honest penny by the free 
expenditure of ink. It gives us a glimpse of the 
high figure presumably reached by all the honest 
pennies accumulated in the cause, and throws us 
quite into a glow over the march of civilization and 
the way we have organized our conveniences. From 
this point of view it might indeed go far towards 
making us enthusiastic about our age. What is 
more calculated to inspire us with a just compla- 
cency than the sight of a new and flourishing in- 



CRITICISM 261 

dustry, a fine economy of production ? The great 
business of reviewing has, in its roaring routine, 
many of the signs of blooming health, many of the 
features which beguile one into rendering an invol- 
untary homage to successful enterprise. 

Yet it is not to be denied that certain captious 
persons are to be met who are not carried away by 
the spectacle, who look at it much askance, who see 
but dimly whither it tends, and who find no aid to 
vision even in the great light (about itself, its spirit, 
and its purposes, among other things) that it might 
have been expected to diffuse. " Is there any such 
great light at all ?" we may imagine the most rest- 
less of the sceptics to inquire, " and isn't the effect 
rather one of a certain kind of pretentious and un- 
profitable gloom ?" The vulgarity, the crudity, the 
stupidity which this cherished combination of the 
off-hand review and of our wonderful system of pub- 
licity have put into circulation on so vast a scale 
may be represented, in such a mood, as an unprec- 
edented invention for darkening counsel. The be- 
wildered spirit may ask itself, without speedy answer, 
What is the function in the life of man of such a 
periodicity of platitude and irrelevance ? Such a 
spirit will wonder how the life of man survives it, 
and, above all, what is much more important, how 
literature resists it ; whether, indeed, literature does 
resist it and is not speedily going down beneath it. 
The signs of this catastrophe will not in the case 
we suppose be found too subtle to be pointed out — 
the failure of distinction, the failure of style, the 



262 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

failure of knowledge, the failure of thought. The 
case is therefore one for recognizing with dismay 
that we are paying a tremendous price for the dif- 
fusion of penmanship and opportunity ; that the mul- 
tiplication of endowments for chatter may be as fatal 
as an infectious disease; that literature lives essen- 
tially, in the sacred depths of its being, upon exam- 
ple, upon perfection wrought ; that, like other sensitive 
organisms, it is highly susceptible of demoralization, 
and that nothing is better calculated than irrespon- 
sible pedagogy to make it close its ears and lips. To 
be puerile and untutored about it is to deprive it of 
air and light, and the consequence of its keeping 
bad company is that it loses all heart. We may, of 
course, continue to talk about it long after it has 
bored itself to death, and there is every appearance 
that this is mainly the way in which our descendants 
will hear of it. They will, however, acquiesce in its 
extinction. 

This, I am aware, is a dismal conviction, and I 
do not pretend to state the case gayly. The most I 
can say is that there are times and places in which 
it strikes one as less desperate than at others. One 
of the places is Paris, and one of the times is some 
comfortable occasion of being there. The custom 
of rough-and-ready reviewing is, among the French, 
much less rooted than with us, and the dignity of 
criticism is, to my perception, in consequence much 
higher. The art is felt to be one of the most diffi- 
cult, the most delicate, the most occasional ; and the 
material on which it is exercised is subject to selec- 



CRITICISM 263 

tion, to restriction. That is, whether or no the 
French are always right as to what they do notice, 
they strike me as infallible as to what they don't. 
They publish hundreds of books which are never 
noticed at all, and yet they are much neater book- 
makers than we. It is recognized that such volumes 
have nothing to say to the critical sense, that they 
do not belong to literature, and that the possession 
of the critical sense is exactly what makes it impos- 
sible to read them and dreary to discuss them — 
places them, as a part of critical experience, out of 
the question. The critical sense, in France, ne se 
derange pas, as the phrase is, for so little. No one 
would deny, on the other hand, that when it does set 
itself in motion it goes further than with us. It 
handles the subject in general with finer finger-tips. 
The bluntness of ours, as tactile implements ad- 
dressed to an exquisite process, is still sometimes 
surprising, even after frequent exhibition. We blun- 
der in and out of the affair as if it were a railway 
station — the easiest and most public of the arts. 
It is in reality the most complicated and the most 
particular. The critical sense is so far from fre- 
quent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession 
of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one 
of the highest distinctions. It is a gift inestimably 
precious and beautiful ; therefore, so far from think- 
ing that it passes overmuch from hand to hand, one 
knows that one has only to stand by the counter an 
hour to see that business is done with baser coin. 
We have too many small school-masters ; yet not 



264 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

only do I not question in literature the high utility 
of criticism, but I should be tempted to say that the 
part it plays may be the supremely beneficent one 
when it proceeds from deep sources, from the effi- 
cient combination of experience and perception. In 
this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the 
artist, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter, the 
brother. The more the tune is noted and the direc- 
tion observed the more we shall enjoy the conve- 
nience of a critical literature. When one thinks of 
the outfit required for free work in this spirit, one 
is ready to pay almost any homage to the intelli- 
gence that has put it on ; and when one considers 
the noble figure completely equipped — armed cap-a- 
pie in curiosity and sympathy — one falls in love with 
the apparition. It certainly represents the knight 
who has knelt through his long vigil and who has 
the piety of his office. For there is something sac- 
rificial in his function, inasmuch as he offers himself 
as a general touchstone. To lend himself, to pro- 
ject himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till 
he understands, and to understand so well that he 
can say, to have perception at the pitch of passion 
and expression as embracing as the air, to be infi- 
nitely curious and incorrigibly patient, and yet plas- 
tic and inflammable and determinable, stooping to 
conquer and serving to direct — these are fine chances 
for an active mind, chances to add the idea of inde- 
pendent beauty to the conception of success. Just 
in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in 
proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and pene- 



CRITICISM 265 

trates, is the critic a valuable instrument; for in 
literature assuredly criticism is the critic, just as art 
is the artist ; it being assuredly the artist who in- 
vented art and the critic who invented criticism, 
and not the other way round. 

And it is with the kinds of criticism exactly as it 
is with the kinds of art — the best kind, the only kind 
worth speaking of, is the kind that springs from the 
liveliest experience. There are a hundred labels 
and tickets, in all this matter, that have been pasted 
on from the outside and appear to exist for the con- 
venience of passers-by ; but the critic who lives in 
the house, ranging through its innumerable cham- 
bers, knows nothing about the bills on the front. 
He only knows that the more impressions he has 
the more he is able to record, and that the more he 
is saturated, poor fellow, the more he can give out. 
His life, at this rate, is heroic, for it is immensely 
vicarious. He has to understand for others, to an- 
swer for them ; he is always under arms. He knows 
that the whole honor of the matter, for him, besides 
the success in his own eyes, depends upon his being 
indefatigably supple, and that is a formidable order. 
Let me not speak, however, as if his work were a 
conscious grind, for the sense of effort is easily lost 
in the enthusiasm of curiosity. Any vocation has 
its hours of intensity that is so closely connected 
with life. That of the critic, in literature, is con- 
nected doubly, for he deals with life at second-hand 
as well as at first ; that is, he deals with the expe- 
rience of others, which he resolves into his own, 



266 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

and not of those invented and selected others with 
whom the novelist makes comfortable terms, but 
with the uncompromising swarm of authors, the 
clamorous children of history. He has to make them 
as vivid and as free as the novelist makes his pup- 
pets, and yet he has, as the phrase is, to take them 
as they come. We must be easy with him if the 
picture, even when the aim has really been to pene- 
trate, is sometimes confused, for there are baffling 
and there are thankless subjects ; and we make 
everything up to him by the peculiar purity of our 
esteem when the portrait is really, like the happy 
portraits of the other art, a text preserved by trans- 
lation. 

1891. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 

It took place accidentally, after dinner at a hotel 
in London, and I can pretend to transcribe it only 
as the story was told me by one of the interlocutors, 
who was not a professional reporter. The general 
sense of it — but general sense was possibly just what 
it lacked. At any rate, by what I gather, it was a 
friendly, lively exchange of ideas (on a subject or 
two in which at this moment we all appear to be in- 
finitely interested) among several persons who ev- 
idently considered that they were not destitute of 
matter. The reader will judge if they were justified 
in this arrogance. The occasion was perhaps less 
remarkable than my informant deemed it ; still, the 
reunion of half a dozen people with ideas at a lodg- 
ing-house in Sackville Street on a foggy November 
night cannot be accounted a perfectly trivial fact. 
The apartment was the brilliant Belinda's, and the 
day before she had asked Camilla and Oswald to 
dine with her. After this she had invited Clifford 
and Darcy to meet them. Lastly, that afternoon, 
encountering Belwood in a shop in Piccadilly, she 
had begged him to join the party. The " ideas " 
were not produced in striking abundance, as I sur- 
mise, till the company had passed back into the little 



268 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

sitting-room, and cigarettes, after the coffee, had been 
permitted by the ladies, and in the case of one of 
them (the reader must guess which) perhaps even 
more actively countenanced. The train was fired 
by a casual question from the artless Camilla : she 
asked Darcy if he could recommend her a nice book 
to read on the journey to Paris. Then immediately 
the colloquy took a turn which, little dramatic though 
it may appear, I can best present in the scenic form : 

Darcy. My dear lady, what do you mean by a nice 
book ? That's so vague. 

Belinda. You could tell her definitely enough, if 
she asked for a n — for one that's not nice. 

Darcy. How do you mean — I could tell her ? 

Belinda. There are so many; and in this cosmo- 
politan age they are in every one's hands. 

Camilla. Really, Belinda, they are not in mine. 

Oswald. My wife, though she lives in Paris, doesn't 
read French books ; she reads nothing but Tauch- 
nitz. 

Belinda. She has to do that, to make up for you — 
with your French pictures. 

Camilla. He doesn't paint the kind you mean ; he 
paints only landscapes. 

Belinda. That's the kind I mean. 

Oswald. You may call me French if you like, but 
don't call me cosmopolitan. I'm sick of that word. 

Belwood. You may call me so — I like it. 

Belinda. Oh, you of course — you're an analyst. 

Clifford. Bless me, how you're abusing us ! 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 269 

Belinda. Ah, not you — you certainly are not one. 

Darcy (to Clifford'). You don't get off the better. 
But it's as you take it. 

Clifford. A plague on analysis ! 

Darcy. Yes, that's one way. Only, you make me 
ashamed of my question to Camilla — it's so refined. 

Camilla. What, then, do you call a book when you 
like it ? I mean a nice, pretty, pleasant, interesting 
book ; rather long, so as not to be over quickly. 

Oswald. It never is with you, my dear. You read 
a page a day. 

Behvood. I should like to write something for Ca- 
milla. 

Belinda. To make her read faster ? 

Camilla. I shouldn't understand it. 

Belinda. Precisely — you'd skip. But Darcy never 
likes anything — he's a critic. 

Darcy. Only of books — not of people, as you are. 

Belinda. Oh, I like people. 

Belwood. They give it back ! 

Belinda. I mean I care for them even when I don't 
like them — it's all life. 

Darcy (smiling). That's just what I often think 
about books. 

Belwood. Ah, yes, life — life ! 

Clifford. Oh, bother life ! Of course you mean a 
novel, Camilla. 

Belinda. What else can a woman mean? The 
book to-day is the novel. 

Oswald. And the woman is the public. I'm glad 
I don't write. It's bad enough to paint. 



270 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Belwood. I protest against that. 

Belinda. Against what ? 

Belwood. Against everything. The woman being 
the public, to begin with. 

Belinda. It's very ungrateful of you. Where would 
you be without them ? 

Darcy. Belwood is right, in this sense : that though 
they are very welcome as readers, it is fatal to write 
for them. 

Belwood. Who writes for them ? One writes for 
one's self. 

Belinda. They write for themselves. 

Darcy. And for each other. 

Oswald. I didn't know women did anything for 
each other. 

Darcy. It shows how little you read ; for if they 
are, as you say, the great consumers to-day, they are 
still more the great producers. No one seems to no- 
tice it — but no one notices anything. Literature is 
/ simply undergoing a transformation — it's becoming 
feminine. That's a portentous fact. 

Oswald. It's very dreadful. 

Belinda. Take care — we shall paint yet, 

Oswald. I've no doubt you will — it will be fine ! 

Belwood. It will contribute in its degree to the 
great evolution which as yet is only working vaguely 
and dumbly in the depths of things, but which is 
even now discernible, by partial, imperfect signs, to 
the intelligent, and which will certainly become the 
huge " issue " of the future, belittling and swallowing 
up all our paltry present strife, our armaments and 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 27 1 

wars, our international hatreds, and even our inter- 
national Utopias, our political muddles, and looming 
socialisms. It will make these things seem, in retro- 
spect, a bed of roses. 

Belinda. And pray what is it ? 

Belwood. The essential, latent antagonism of the 
sexes — the armed opposed array of men and women, 
founded on irreconcilable interests. Hitherto we 
have judged these interests reconcilable, and even 
practically identical. But all that is changing be- 
cause women are changing, and their necessary hos- 
tility to men — or that of men to them, I don't care 
how you put it — is rising by an inexorable logic to 
the surface. It is deeper — ah, far deeper, than our 
need of each other, deep as we have always held 
that to be ; and some day it will break out on a 
scale that will make us all turn pale. 

Belinda. The Armageddon of the future, quoit 

Camilla. I turn pale already ! 

Belinda. I don't — I blush for his folly. 

Darcy. Excuse the timidity of my imagination, but 
it seems to me that we must be united. 

Belwood. That's where it is, as they say. We shall 
be united by hate. 

Belinda. The Kilkenny cats, quoit 

Oswald. Well, we shall have the best of it — we can 
thrash them. 

Belwood. I am not so sure ; for if it's a question of 
the power of the parties to hurt each other, that of 
the sex to which these ladies belong is immense. 

Camilla. Why, Belwood, I wouldn't hurt you for 
the world. 



272 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Belinda. I would, but I don't want to wait a thou- 
sand years. 

Belwood. I'm sorry, but you'll have to. Mean- 
while we shall be comfortable enough, with such 
women as Camilla. 

Belinda. Thank you — for her. 

Belwood. And as it won't be for a thousand years, 
I may say that Darcy's account of the actual trans- 
formation of literature is based on rather a partial, 
local view. It isn't at all true of France. 

Darcy. Oh, France ! France is sometimes tire- 
some ; she contradicts all one's generalizations. 

Belinda. Dame, she contradicts her own ! 

Belwood. They're so clever, the French ; they've 
arranged everything, in their system, so much more 
comfortably than we. They haven't to bother about 
women's work ; that sort of thing doesn't exist for 
them, and they are not flooded with the old maids' 
novels which (a cynic or a purist would say) make 
English literature ridiculous. 

Darcy. No, they have no Miss Austen. 

Belinda.. And what do you do with George Sand ? 

Belwood. Do you call her an old maid ? 

Belinda. She was a woman ; we are speaking of 
that. 

Belwood. Not a bit — she was only a motherly man. 

Clifford. For Heaven's sake, and with all respect 
to Belwood, don't let us be cosmopolitan ! Our prej- 
udices are our responsibilities, and I hate to see a 
fine, big, healthy one dying of neglect, when it might 
grow up to support a family. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 273 

Belwood. Ah, they don't support families now ; it's 
as much as they can do to scrape along for them- 
selves. 

Clifford. If you weren't a pessimist I should nearly 
become one. Our literature is good enough for us, 
and I don't at all complain of the ladies. They 
write jolly good novels sometimes, and I don't see 
why they shouldn't. 

Oswald. It's true they play lawn-tennis. 

Belwood. So they do, and that's more difficult. 
I'm perfectly willing to be English. 

Belinda. Or American. 

Belwood. Take care — that's cosmopolitan. 

Belinda. For you, yes, but not for me. 

Belwood. Yes, see what a muddle — with Clifford's 
simplifications. That's another thing the French 
have been clever enough to keep out of : the great 
silly schism of language, of usage, of literature. 
They have none of those clumsy, questions — Amer- 
ican - English and English - American. French is 
French, and that's the end of it. 

Clifford. And English is English. 

Belinda. And American's American. 

Belwood. Perhaps ; but that's not the end of it, it's 
the very beginning. And the beginning of such a 
weariness ! 

Darcy. A weariness only if our frivolity makes it 
so. It is true our frivolity is capable of anything. 

Clifford. Oh, I like our frivolity ! 

Darcy. So it would seem, if you fail to perceive that 
our insistence on international differences is stupid. 
18 



274 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Clifford. I'm not bound to perceive anything so 
metaphysical. The American papers are awfully 
funny. Why shouldn't one say so ? I don't insist — 
I never insisted on anything in my life. 

Oswald. We are awfully different, say what you 
will. 

Darcy. Rubbish — rubbish — rubbish ! 

Oswald. Go to Paris and you'll see. 

Clifford. Oh, don't go to Paris again ! 

Darcy. What has Paris to do with it ? 

Belwood. We must be large — we must be rich. 

Oswald. All the American painters are there. Go 
and see what they are doing, what they hold paint- 
ing to be ; and then come and look at the English 
idea. 

Belinda. Do you call it an idea ? 

Darcy. You ought to be fined, and I think I shall 
propose the establishment of a system of fines, for 
the common benefit of the two peoples and the dis- 
couragement of aggravation. 

Belinda. Dear friend, can't one breathe? Who 
does more for the two peoples than I, and for the 
practical solution of their little squabbles? Their 
squabbles are purely theoretic, and the solution is 
real, being simply that of personal intercourse. While 
we talk, and however we talk, association is cunning- 
ly, insidiously doing its indestructible work. It works 
1 while we're asleep — more than we can undo while 
we're awake. It is wiser than we — it has a deeper 
motive. And what could be a better proof of what I 
say than the present occasion? All our intercourse 



f 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 275 

is a perpetual conference, and this is one of its sit- 
tings. They're informal, casual, humorous, but none 
the less useful, because they are full of an irrepress- 
ible give-and-take. What other nations are contin- 
ually meeting to talk over the reasons why they 
shouldn't meet ? What others are so sociably sepa- 
rate — so intertwinedly, cohesively alien ? We talk 
each other to sleep ; it's becoming insipid — that's the 
only drawback. Am I not always coming and going, 
so that I have lost all sense of where I " belong " ? 
And aren't we, in this room, such a mixture that we 
scarcely, ourselves, know who is who and what is 
what? Clifford utters an inarticulate and ambiguous 
sound, but I rejoice in the confusion, for it makes for 
civilization. 

Belwood. All honor to Belinda, mistress of hos- 
pitality and of irony ! 

Clifford. Your party is jolly, but I didn't know it 
was so improving. Don't let us at any rate be insipid. 

Belinda. We shall not, while you're here — even 
though you have no general ideas. 

Belwood. Belinda has an extraordinary number, 
for a woman. 

Belinda. Perhaps I am only a motherly man. 

Oswald. Sisterly, rather. Talk of the fraternitk of 
the French ! But I feel rather out of it, in Paris. 

Belinda. You're not in Paris — you're just here. 

Camilla. But we are going to - morrow, and no one 
has yet told me a book for the train. 

Clifford. Get " The Rival Bridesmaids "; it's a tre- 
mendous lark. And I am large, I am rich, as Bel- 



276 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

wood says, in recommending it, because it's about 
New York — one of your "society -novels," full of 
" snap " ! And by a woman, I guess ; though it 
strikes me that with American novels you can't be 
very sure. 

Camilla. The women write like men ? 

Clifford. Or the men write like women. 

Camilla. Then I expect (if you like that better) 
that it's horrid, one of those American productions 
that are never heard of la-bas and yet find themselves 
circulating in England. 

Clifford. I see — the confusion commended by Be- 
linda. It's very dense. 

Camilla. Besides, whoever it was that said a book 
is as a matter of course a novel, it wasn't I. 

Belwood. As no one seems prepared to father that 
terrible proposition, I will just remark, in relation to 
the matter we are talking about — 

Oswald. Lord, which? We are talking of so 
many! 

Belwood. You will understand when I say that an 
acuteness of national sentiment on the part of my 
nation and yours (as against each other, of course, I 
mean) is more and more an artificial thing — a matter 
of perverted effort and deluded duty. It is kept up 
by the newspapers, which must make a noise at any 
price, and whose huge, clumsy machinery (it exists 
only for that) is essentially blundering. They are 
incapable of the notation of private delicacies, in 
spite of the droll assumption of so many sheets that 
private life is their domain ; and they keep striking 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 



77 



the wrong hour with a complacency which misleads 
the vulgar. Unfortunately the vulgar are many. 
All the more reason why the children of light should 
see clear. 

Darcy. Ah, those things are an education which I 
think even the French might envy us. 

Oswald. What things ? 

Darcy, The recriminations, the little digs, what- 
ever you choose to call them, between America and 
England. 

Oswald. I thought you just said they were rubbish. 

Darcy. It's the perception that they are rubbish 
that constitutes the education. 

Oswald. I see — you're educated. I'm afraid I'm 
not. 

Clifford. And I, too, perceive how much I have to 
learn. 

Belinda. You are both naughty little boys who 
won't go to school. 

Darcy. An education of the intelligence, of the tem- 
per, of the manners. 

Clifford. Do you think your manners to us show 
so much training ? 

Oswald (to Clifford}. They are perhaps on the 
whole as finished as yours to us ! 

Belinda. A fine, a fine to each of you ! 

Darcy. Quite right, and Belinda shall impose them. 
I don't say we are all formed — the formation will 
have to be so large : I see it as majestic, as magnif- 
icent. But we are forming. The opportunity is grand, 
there has never been anything like it in the world. 



278 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Oswald. I'm not sure I follow you. 

Darcy. Why, the opportunity for two great peoples 
to accept, or rather to cultivate with talent, a com- 
mon destiny, to tackle the world together, to unite in 
the arts of peace — by which I mean of course in the 
arts of life. It will make life larger and the arts finer 
for each of them. It will be an immense and compli- 
cated problem of course — to see it through; but 
that's why I speak of it as an object of envy to other 
nations, in its discipline, its suggestiveness, the initia- 
tion, the revelation it will lead to. Their problems, 
in comparison, strike me as small and vulgar. It's 
not true that there is nothing new under the sun ; the 
donn'ee of the drama that England and America may 
act out together is absolutely new. Essentially new 
is the position in which they stand towards each other. 
It rests with all of us to make it newer still. 

Clifford. I hope there will be a scene in the comedy 
for international copyright. 

Darcy. A-ah ! 

Belinda. O-oh ! 

Belwood. I say ! 

Darcy. That will come — very soon: to a positive 
certainty. 

Clifford. What do you call very soon? You seem 
to be talking for the ages. 

Belwood. It's time — yes, it's time now. I can un- 
derstand that hitherto — 

Clifford. I can't ! 

Darcy. I'm not sure whether I can or not. I'm 
trying what I can understand. But it's all in the 
day's work — we are learning. 



<!--■ 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 279 

Clifford. Learning at our expense ! That's very 
nice. I observe that Oswald is silent ; as an example 
of good manners he ought to defend the case. 

Belinda. He's thinking of what he can say, and so 
am I. 

Camilla. Let me assist my husband. How did 
Clifford come by " The Rival Bridesmaids " ? Wasn't 
it a pirated copy ? 

Clifford. Do you call that assisting him ? I don't 
know whether it was or not, and at all events it 
needn't have been. Very likely the author lives in 
England. 

Camilla. In England ? 

Clifford. Round the corner, quoi, as Belinda says. 

Oswald. We have had to have cheap books, we 
have always been hard-working, grinding, bread-earn- 
ing readers. 

Clifford. Bravo — at last ! You might have had 
them as cheap as you liked. What you mean is you 
wanted them for nothing. Ah, yes, you're so poor ! 

Belwood. Well, it has made you, your half-century 
of books for nothing, a magnificent public for us now. 
We appreciate that. 

Belinda. Magnanimous Belwood ! Thank you for 
that. 

Darcy. The better day is so surely coming that I 
was simply taking it for granted. 

Clifford. Wait till it comes and then we'll start fair. 
Belinda. Yes, we really can't talk till it does. 
Darcy. On the contrary, talking will help it to 
come. 



280 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Belinda. If it doesn't come, and very soon — to- 
morrow, next week — our mouths will be shut forever. 

Darcy. Ah, don't be horrible ! 

Clifford. Yes, you won't like that. 

Oswald. You will ; so it's perhaps your interest. 

Darcy. I don't mean our shut mouths — I mean 
the reason for them. 

Belinda (to Oswald). You remind me that you and 
Clifford are fined. But I think it must only be a 
farthing for Clifford. 

Clifford. I won't pay even that. I speak but the 
truth, and under the circumstances I think I'm very 
civil. 

Oswald. Don't give up your grievance — it will be 
worth everything to you. 

Belinda. You're fined five dollars ! 

Darcy. If copyright doesn't come, I'll — {hesitat- 
ing). 

Ctifford {waiting). What will you do ? 

Darcy. I'll get me to a nunnery. 

Clifford. Much good will that do ! 

Darcy. My nunnery shall be in the United States, 
and I shall found there a library of English novels in 
the original three volumes. 

Belinda. I shall do very differently. I shall come 
out of my cell like Peter the Hermit ; I shall cry 
aloud for a crusade. 

Clifford. Your comparison doesn't hold, for you 
are yourself an infidel. 

Belinda. A fig for that ! I shall fight under the 
cross. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 251 

Belwood. There's a great army over there now. 

Clifford. I hope they'll win ! 

Belwood. If they don't, you Americans must make 
a great literature, such as we shall read with delight, 
pour it out on us unconditionally, and pay us back 
that way. 

Clifford. I shall not object to that arrangement if 
we do read with delight ! 

Belwood. Ah, that will depend partly also on us. 

Darcy. Delicate Belwood ! If what we do becomes 
great, you will probably understand it — at least I 
hope so ! But I like the way you talk about great 
literatures. Does it strike you that they are breaking 
out about the world that way ? 

Clifford. Send us over some good novels for noth- 
ing, and we'll call it square. 

Belwood. I admit, our preoccupations, everywhere 
— those of the race in general — don't seem to make 
for literature. 

Clifford. Then we English shall never be repaid.. 

Oswald. Are the works you give to America then 
so literary ? 

Clifford. We give everything — we have given all 
the great people. 

Oswald. Ah, the great people — if you mean those 
of the past — were not yours to give. They were 
ours too ; you pay no more for them than we. 

Clifford. It depends upon what you mean by the 
past. 

Darcy. I don't think it's particularly in our inter- 
est to go into the chronology of the matter. We 



252 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

pirated Byron — we pirated Scott. Nor does it profit 
to differ about which were the great ones. They 
were all great enough for us to take, and we took 
them. We take them to-day, however the superior 
may estimate them ; and we should take them still, 
even if the superior were to make more reservations. 
It has been our misfortune (in the long run, I mean) 
that years and years ago, when the taking began, it 
was, intelligently viewed, quite inevitable. We were 
poor then, and we were hungry and lonely and far 
away, and we had to have something to read. We 
helped ourselves to the literature that was nearest, 
which was all the more attractive that it had about 
it, in its native form, such a fine glamour of ex- 
pense, of the guinea volume and the wide margin. 
It was aristocratic, and a civilization can't make itself 
without that. If it isn't the bricks, it's the mortar. 
The first thing a society does after it has left the 
aristocratic out is to put it in again : of course, I use 
the word in a loose way. We couldn't pay a fancy 
price for that element, and we only paid what we 
could. The booksellers made money, and the pub- 
lic only asked if there wasn't more — it asked no 
other questions. You can treat books as a luxury, 
and authors with delicacy, only if you've already got 
a lot : you can't start on that basis. 

Clifford. But I thought your claim is precisely that 
you had a lot — all our old writers. 

Darcy. The old writers, yes. But the old writers, 
uncontemporary and more or less archaic, were a 
little grim. We were so new ourselves, and our very 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 283 

newness was in itself sufficiently grim. The English 
books of the day (their charm was that they were of 
the day) were our society — we had very little other. 
We were happy to pay the servant for opening the 
door — the bookseller for republishing; but I dare say 
that even if we had thought of it we should have 
had a certain hesitation in feeing the visitors. A 
money-question when they were so polite ! It was 
too kind of them to come. 

Clifford. I don't quite recognize the picture of 
your national humility, at any stage of your existence. 
Even if you had thought of it, you say ? It didn't 
depend upon that. We began to remind you long 
ago— ever so long ago. 

Darcy. Yes, you were fairly prompt. But our 
curse, in the disguise of a blessing, was that mean- 
while we had begun to regard your company as a 
matter of course. Certainly, that should have been 
but a detail when reflection and responsibility had 
come. At what particular period was it to have been 
expected of our conscience to awake ? 

Clifford. If it was last year it's enough. 

Darcy. Oh, it was long ago — very long ago, as you 
say. I assign an early date. But you can't put your 
finger on the place. 

Clifford. On your conscience? 

Darcy. On the period. Our conscience — to speak 
of that — has the defect of not being homogeneous. 
It's very big. 

Clifford. You mean it's elastic ? 

Darcy. On the contrary, it's rigid, in places ; it's 



284 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

numb ; it's not animated to the extremities. A con- 
science is a natural organ, but if it's to be of any use 
in the complications of life it must also be a culti- 
vated one. Ours is cultivated, highly cultivated, in 
spots ; but there are large, crude patches. 

Clifford. I see — an occasional oasis in the desert. 

Darcy. No — blooming farms in the prairie. The 
prairie is rich, but it's not all settled ; there are 
promising barbarous tracts. Therefore the different 
parts of the organ to which I have likened it don't, 
just as yet, all act together. But when they do — 

Clifford. When they do we shall all be dead of 
starvation. 

Belinda. I'll divide my own pittance with you 
first. 

Camilla. I'm glad we live in Paris. In Paris they 
don't mind. 

Darcy. They mind something else. 

Oswald {bracing hi?nself). He means the invidious 
duty the American government has levied on foreign 
works of art. In intention it's prohibitive — they 
won't admit free any but American productions. 

Belwood. That's a fine sort of thing for the culture 
of a people. 

Clifford. It keeps out monarchical pictures. 

Belinda (to Oswald). Why did you tell — before 
two Englishmen ? 

Camilla. I never even heard of it — in Paris. 

Belwood. Ah, there they are too polite to reproach 
you with it. 

Oswald. It doesn't keep out anything, for in fact 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 285 

the duty, though high, isn't at all prohibitive. If it 
were effective it would be effective almost altogether 
against the French, whose pictures are not monarch- 
ical, but as republican as our own, so that Clifford's 
taunt is wasted. The people over there who buy- 
foreign works of art are very rich, and they buy them 
just the same, duty and all. 

Darcy. Doesn't what you say indicate that the tax 
restricts that ennobling pleasure to the very rich ? 
Without it amateurs of moderate fortune might pick 
up some bits. 

Oswald. Good pictures are rarely cheap. When 
they are dear only the rich can buy them. In the 
few cases where they are cheap the tax doesn't make 
them dear. 

Belinda. Bravo — I'm reassured ! 

Darcy. It doesn't invalidate the fact that French 
artists have spoken of the matter to me with passion 
and scorn, and that I have hung my head and had 
nothing to say. 

Belinda. Oh, Darcy — how can you? Wait till 
they go ! 

Clifford. Hadn't we better go now ? 

Belinda. Dear me, no — not on that note. Wait 
till we work round. 

Clifford. What can you work round to ? 

Camilla. Why, to the novel. I insist on being told 
of a good one. 

Ostvald. The foreigners were frightened at first, 
but things have turned out much better than they 
feared. 



286 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Belinda. We're working round ! 

Oswald. Otherwise do you think I could bear to 
stay in Paris ? 

Darcy. That makes me wince, as I have the face 
to stay in London. 

Oswald. Oh, English pictures — ! 

Darcy. I'm not thinking of English pictures ; 
though I might, for some of them are charming. 

Belwood. What will you have ? It's all protec- 
tion. 

Darcy. We protect the industry and demolish the 
art. 

Oswald. I thought you said you were not thinking 
of the art. 

Darcy. Dear Oswald, there are more than one. 
The art of letters. 

Oswald. Where do you find it to-day — the art of 
letters ? It seems to me to be the industry, all round 
and everywhere. 

Clifford {to Belwood). They squabble among them- 
selves — that may be good for us ! 

Darcy. Don't say squabble, say discuss. Of 
course we discuss ; but from the moment we do so 
vous en Hes, indefeasibly. There is no such thing as 
" themselves," on either side ; it's all 0«rselves. The 
fact of discussion welds us together, and we have 
properties in common that we can't get rid of. 

Oswald. My dear Darcy, you're fantastic. 

Clifford. You do squabble, you do ! 

Darcy. Call it so, then : don't you see how you're 
in it? 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 287 

Belwood. I see very well — I feel it all. 

Clifford. I don't then — hanged if I'm in it ! 

Camilla. Now they are squabbling ! 

Belwood. Our conversation certainly supports Be- 
linda's contention that we are in indissoluble contact. 
Our interchange of remarks just now about copyright 
was a signal proof of union. 

Clifford. It was humiliating for these dear Amer- 
icans — if you call that union ! 

Belwood. Clifford, I'm ashamed of you. 

Camilla. They are squabbling — they are ! 

Belinda. Yes, but we don't gain by it. I am 
humiliated, and Darcy was pulled up short. 

Clifford. You're in a false position, quoi! You 
see how intolerable that is. You feel it in every- 
thing. 

Belinda. Yes, it's a loss of freedom — the greatest 
form of suffering. A chill has descended upon me, 
and I'm not sure I can shake it off. I don't want 
this delightful party to break up, yet I feel as if we 
— I mean we four — had nothing more to say. 

Oswald. We have all in fact chattered enough. 

Camilla. Oh, be cheerful and talk about the novel. 

Clifford. Innocent Camilla — as if the novel to-day 
were cheerful ! 

Belinda. I see Darcy has more assurance. 

Belwood. You mean he has more ideas. 

Darcy. It is because dear Belwood is here. If I 
were alone with Clifford I dare say I should be rather 
low. But I have more to say, inconsequent, and per- 
haps even indecent, as that may be. I have it at 



205 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

heart to say that the things that divide us appear to 
me, when they are enumerated by the people who 
profess to be acutely conscious of them, ineffably 
small. 

Clifford. Small for you ! 

Belinda. Clifford, if you are impertinent I shall 
rise from my ashes. Darcy is so charming. 

Oswald. He's so ingenious. 

Belwood. Continue to be charming, Darcy. That's 
the spell ! 

Darcy. I'm not ingenious at all ; I'm only a God- 
fearing, plain man, saying things as they strike him. 

Camilla. You are charming. 

Darcy. Well, it doesn't prevent me from having 
noticed the other day, in a magazine, in a recrimina- 
tory, a retaliatory (I don't know what to call it) arti- 
cle, a phrase to the effect that the author, an Amer- 
ican, would frankly confess, and take his stand on it, 
that he liked rocking-chairs, Winchester rifles, and 
iced water. He seemed a very bristling gentleman, 
and they apparently were his ultimatum. It made 
me reflect on these symbols of our separateness, 
and I wanted to put the article into the fire before 
a Frenchman or a German should see it. 

Clifford. Iced water, rocking-chairs, and copyright. 

Darcy. Well, add copyright after all ! 

Belinda. Darcy is irrepressible. 

Darcy. It wouldn't make the spectacle sensibly 
less puerile, or I may say less grotesque, for a 
Frenchman or a German. They are not quarrel- 
ling about copyright — or even about rocking-chairs. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 289 

Clifford. Or even about fisheries, or even about 
the public manners engendered by presidential elec- 
tions. 

Oswald {to Darcy). Don't you know your country- 
people well enough to know just how much they care, 
by which I mean how little, for what a Frenchman or 
a German may think of them ? 

Clifford. And don't you know mine ? 

Oswald. Or an Englishman ? 

Clifford. Or an American ? 

Darcy. Oh, every country cares, much more in 
practice than in theory. The form of national sus- 
ceptibility differs with different peoples, but the sub- 
stance is very much the same. 

Belwood. I am appalled, when I look at the prin- 
cipal nations of the globe, at the vivacity of their 
mutual hatreds, as revealed by the bright light of the 
latter end of the nineteenth century. We are very 
proud of that light, but that's what it principally 
shows us. Look at the European family— it's a per- 
fect menagerie of pet aversions. And some coun- 
tries resemble fat old ladies — they have so many 
pets. It is certainly worse than it used to be ; of 
old we didn't exchange compliments every day. 

Darcy. It is only worse in this sense, that we see 
more of each other now, we touch each other infi- 
nitely more. 

Behvood. Our acrimonies are a pleasant result of 
that. 

Darcy. They are not a final one. We must get 
used to each other. It's a rough process, if you like, 
19 



290 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

but there are worse discomforts. Our modern inti- 
macy is a very new thing, it has brought us face to 
face, and in this way the question comes up for each 
party of whether it likes, whether it can live with the 
other. The question is practical, it's social now ; be- 
fore it was academic and official. Newspapers, tele- 
graphs, trains, fast steamers, all the electricities and 
publicities that are playing over us like a perpetual 
thunder-storm, have made us live in a common me- 
dium, which is far from being a non-conductor. The 
world has become a big hotel, the Grand Hotel of 
the Nations, and we meet — I mean the nations meet 
— on the stairs and at the table d'hote. You know the 
faces at the table d'ndte, one is never enthusiastic 
about them ; they give on one's nerves. All the 
same, their wearers fall into conversation, and often 
find each other quite nice. We are in the first stage, 
looking at each other, glaring at each other, if you 
will, while the entree goes round. We play the piano, 
we smoke, we chatter in our rooms, and the sound 
and the fumes go through. But we won't pull down 
the house, because by to-morrow we shall have found 
our big polyglot inn, with its German waiters, rather 
amusing. 

Belinda. Call them Jews as well as Germans. The 
landlord is German, too. 

Oswald. What a horrible picture ! I don't accept 
it for America and England ; I think those parties 
have each a very good house of their own. 

Darcy. From the moment you resent, on our be- 
half, the vulgarity of the idea of hotel-life, see what 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 29 1 

a superior situation, apart in our duality and distin- 
guished, you by that very fact conceive for us. Bel- 
wood's image is, to my sense, graceful enough, even 
though it may halt a little. The fisheries, and all the 
rest, are simply the piano in the next room. It may be 
played at the wrong hour, but that isn't a casus belli ; 
we can thump on the wall, we can rattle the door, we 
can arrange. And for that matter, surely it is not 
to be desired that all questions between us should 
cease. There must be enough to be amusing, que 
diable! As Belinda said, it's already becoming in- 
sipid. 

Clifford. Perhaps we had better keep the copyright 
matter open for the fun of it. It's remarkable fun 
for us. 

Oswald. It's fun for you that our tongues are 
tied, as Belinda and Darcy declare. 

Clifford. Are they indeed ? I haven't perceived it. 

Belinda. Every one on our side, I admit, has not 
Darcy's delicacy. 

Darcy. Nor Belinda's. 

Oswald. Yet I think of innumerable things we 
don't say — that we might ! 

Clifford. You mean that you yourself might. If 
you think of them, pray say them. 

Oswald. Oh, no, my tongue is tied. 

Clifford. Come, I'll let you off. 

Oswald. It's very good of you, but there are oth- 
ers who wouldn't. 

Clifford. How would " others " know ? Would 
your remarks have such a reverberation ? 



292 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Belinda. I won't let him off, and please remem- 
ber that this is my house. 

Clifford. It's doubtless a great escape for me. 

Oswald. You are all escaping all the while, under 
cover of your grievance. There would be a great 
deal to be said for the policy of your not letting it 
go. The advantage of it may be greater than the 
injury. If we pay you we can criticise you. 

Clifford. Why, on the contrary, it's that that will 
be an advantage for us. Fancy, immense ! 

Oswald. Oh, you won't like it ! 

Clifford. Will it be droller than it is already ? We 
shall delight in it. 

Belwood. Oh, there are many things to say ! 

Darcy. Detached Belwood ! 

Belwood. Attached, on the contrary. Attached to 
everything we have in common. 

Darcy. Delightful Belwood ! 

Belwood. Delightful Darcy! 

Belinda (to Clifford). That's the way you and Os- 
wald should be. 

Clifford. It makes me rather sick, and I think, 
from the expression of Oswald's face, that it has 
the same effect upon him. 

Oswald. I hate a fool's paradise ; it's the thing in 
the world I most pray to keep clear of. 

Darcy. There is no question of paradise — that's 
the last thing. Your folly as well as your ecstasy 
is, on the contrary, in your rigid national conscious- 
ness ; it's the extravagance of a perpetual spasm. 
What I go in for is a great reality, and our making 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 293 

it comprehensive and fruitful. Of course we shall 
never do anything without imagination — by remain- 
ing dull and dense and literal. 

Oswald. Attrappe! 

Clifford. What does Oswald mean ? I don't un- 
derstand French. 

Oswald. I have heard you speak it to-night. 

Clifford. Then I don't understand your pronuncia- 
tion. 

Oswald. It's not that of Stratford-at-Bow. The 
difference between your ideas about yourselves and 
the way your performances strike the rest of the 
world is one of the points that might be touched 
upon if it were not, as I am advised, absolutely im- 
possible. The emanation of talent and intelligence 
from your conversation, your journals, your books — 

Cliffo?-d. I give you up our conversation, and even 
our journals. As for our books, they are clever 
enough for you to steal. 

Belinda. See what an immense advantage Clifford 
has 1 

Oswald. I acknowledge it in advance. 

Camilla. I like their books better than ours. I 
love a good English novel. 

Oswald. If you were not so naive, you wouldn't 
dare to say so in Paris. Darcy was talking about 
what a German, what a Frenchman thinks. Parlons- 
en, of what a Frenchman thinks ! 

Belinda. I thought you didn't care. 

Belwood. He means thinks of us. 

Darcy. An intelligent foreigner might easily think 



294 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

it is open to us to have the biggest international life 
in the world. 

Oswald. Darcy has formed the foolish habit of liv- 
ing in England, and it has settled upon him so that 
he has become quite provincialized. I believe he 
really supposes that that's the centre of ideas. 

Clifford. Oh, hang ideas ! 

Oswald. Thank you, Clifford. He has lost all sense 
of proportion and perspective, of the way things strike 
people on the continent — on the continents — in the 
clear air of the world. He has forfeited his birth- 
right. 

Darcy. On the contrary, I have taken it up, and 
my eye for perspective has grown so that I see an 
immensity where you seem to me to see a dusky little 
cul-de-sac. 

Clifford. Is Paris the centre of ideas ? 

Belinda. I thought it was Berlin. 

Camilla. Oh, dear, must we go and live in Berlin ? 

Darcy. Why will no one have the courage to say 
frankly that it's New York ? 

Belwood. Wouldn't it be Boston, rather ? 

Oswald. I am not obliged to say where it is, and I 
am not at all sure that there is such a place. But I 
know very well where it's not. There are places 
where there are more ideas — places where there are 
fewer — and places where there are none at all. In 
Paris there are many, in constant circulation ; you 
meet them in periodicals, in books, and in the con- 
versation of the people. The people are not afraid 
of them — they quite like them. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 295 

Belinda. Some of them are charming, and one must 
congratulate the people who like them on their taste. 

Oswald. They are not all for women, and, mon 
Dieu, you must take one with another. You must 
have all sorts to have many, and you must have 
many to have a few good ones. 

Clifford. You express yourself like a preliminary 
remark in a French etude. 

Belinda. Clifford, I shall have to double that far- 
thing ! 

Belwood. If the book at present is the novel, the 
French book is the French novel. And if the ideas 
are in the book, we must go to the French novel for 
our ideas. 

Clifford. Another preliminary remark — does any 
one follow ? 

Ddrcy. We must go everywhere for them, and we 
may form altogether, you and we — that this our com- 
mon mind may form — the biggest net in the world 
for catching them. 

Oswald. I should like to analyze that queer mixt- 
ure — our common mind — and refer the different in- 
gredients to their respective contributors. However, 
it doesn't strike me as true of France, and it is not 
of France that one would mean it, that the book is 
the novel. Across the Channel there are other liv- 
ing forms. Criticism, for instance, is alive : I notice 
that in what is written about the art I endeavor to 
practise. Journalism is alive. 

Belwood. And isn't the novel alive ? 

Oswald. Oh, yes, there are ideas in it — there are 
ideas about it. 



296 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Darcy. In England, too, there are ideas about it ; 
there seems to be nothing else just now. 

Oswald. I haven't come across one. 

Belwood. You might pass it without noticing it — 
they are not so salient. 

Belinda. But I thought we agreed that it was in 
England that it is the form ? 

Oswald. We didn't agree ; but that would be 
my impression. In England, however, even " the 
form " — ! 

Belwood. I see what you mean. Even "the form " 
doesn't carry you very far. That's a pretty picture 
of our literature ! 

Oswald. I should like Darcy to think so. 

Darcy. My dear fellow, Darcy thinks a great many 
things, whereas you appear to him to be able to think 
but one or two. 

Belinda. Do wait till Belwood and Clifford go. 

Belwood. We must, or at least I must, in fact, be 
going. 

Clifford. So must I, though there is a question I 
should have liked still to ask Darcy. 

Camilla. Oh, I'm so disappointed — I hoped we 
should have talked about novels. There seemed a 
moment when we were near it. 

Belinda. We must do that yet — we must all meet 
again. 

Camilla. But, my dear, Oswald and I are going 
to Paris. 

Belinda. That needn't prevent ; the rest of us will 
go over and see you. We'll talk of novels in your salon. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 297 

Camilla. That will be lovely — but will Clifford and 
Belwood come ? 

Clifford. Oh, I go to Paris sometimes ; but not for 
" the form." Nor even for the substance ! 

Oswald. What do you go for ? 

Clifford. Oh, just for the lark ! 

Belwood (to Camilla). I shall go to see you. 

Camilla. You're the nicest Englishman I ever saw. 
And, in spite of my husband, I delight in your 
novels. 

Oswald. I said nothing against Belwood's. And, 
in general, they are proper enough for women — 
especially for little girls like you. 

Clifford (to Camilla). Have you read "Mrs. Jenks 
of Philadelphia " ? 

Camilla. Of Philadelphia ? Jamais de la vie! 

Darcy (to Oswald). You think me so benighted to 
have a fancy for London ; but is it your idea that 
one ought to live in Paris ? 

Belwood. Paris is very well, but why should you 
people give yourself away at such a rate to the 
French ? Much they thank you for it ! They don't 
even know that you do it ! 

Oswald. Darcy is a man of letters, and it's in Paris 
that letters flourish. 

Belinda. Tiens, does Darcy write ? 

Belwood. He writes, but before he writes he ob- 
serves. Why should he observe in a French me- 
dium ? 

Oswald. For the same reason that I do. C'est 
plus clair. 



298 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Darcy. Oswald has no feeling of race. 

Belwood. On the contrary, he feels it as a French- 
man. But why should you Americans keep pottering 
over French life and observing that ? They them- 
selves do nothing else, and surely they suffice to the 
task. Stick to our race — saturate yourself with 
that. 

Oswald. Do you mean the English ? 

Darcy. I know what he means ! 

Oswald. You are mighty mysterious if you do. 

Darcy. I am of Camilla's opinion — I think Bel- 
wood's the nicest Englishman I ever saw. 

Belinda. I am amused at the way it seems not to 
occur to any of us that the proper place to observe 
our own people is in our own country. 

Darcy. Oh, London's the place; it swarms with 
our own people ! 

Oswald. Do you mean with English people ? You 
have mixed things up so that it's hard to know what 
you do mean. 

Darcy. I mean with English people and with 
Americans — I mean with all. Enough is as good as 
a feast, and there are more Americans there than 
even the most rapacious observer can tackle. 

Belinda. This hotel is full of them. 

Darcy. You have only to stand quiet and every 
type passes by. And over here they have a relief — 
it's magnificent ! 

Belinda. They have a relief, but sometimes / have 
none ! You must remember, however, that life isn't 
all observation. It's also action ; it's also sympathy. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 299 

Darcy. To observe for a purpose is action. But 
there are more even than one can sympathize with; 
I am willing to put it that way. 

Oswald. Rubbish — rubbish — rubbish ! 

Belinda. You're rough, Oswald. 

Oswald. He used the same words a while ago. 

Darcy. And then there are all the English, too — 
thrown in. Think what that makes of London, think 
of the collection, the compendium. And Oswald 
talks of Paris ! 

Oswald. The Americans go to Paris in hordes — 
they are famous for it. 

Darcy. They used to be, but it's not so now. 
They flock to London. 

Oswald. Only the stupid ones. 

Darcy. Those are so many, then, that they are 
typical ; they must be watched. 

Belinda. Go away, you two Englishmen ; we are 
washing our dirty linen. 

Belwood. I go. But we have washed ours before 
you. 

Clifford. I also take leave, but I should like to put 
in my question to Darcy first. 

Belinda. He's so exalted — he doesn't hear 
you. 

Oswald. He sophisticates scandalously, in the in- 
terest of a fantastic theory. I might even say in that 
of a personal preference. 

Darcy. Oh, don't speak of my personal preferences 
— you'll never get to the bottom of them ! 

Oswald (to Camilla). Ain't he mysterious ? 



300 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Belinda. I have an idea he hasn't any personal 
preferences. Those are primitive things. 

Camilla. Well, we have them — over there in the 
Avenue Marceau. So we can't cast the first stone. 
I am rather ashamed, before these gentlemen. We're 
a bad lot, we four. 

Clifford. Yes, you're a bad lot. That's why I pre- 
fer " Mrs. Jenks." Can't any of you stand it, over 
there ? 

Belinda. I am going home next year, to remain 
forever. 

Belwood. Then Clifford and I will come over — so 
it will amount to the same thing. 

Darcy. Those are details, and whatever we do or 
don't do, it will amount to the same thing. For we 
are weaving our work together, and it goes on for- 
ever, and it's all one mighty loom. And we are all 
the shuttles — Belinda and Camilla, Belwood, Clifford, 
Oswald, and Darcy — directed by the master-hand. 
We fly to and fro, in our complicated, predestined 
activity, and it matters very little where we are at a 
particular moment. We are all of us here, there, and 
everywhere, wherever the threads are crossed. And 
the tissue grows and grow r s, and we weave into it all 
our lights and our darkness, all our quarrels and rec- 
onciliations, all our stupidities and our strivings, all 
the friction of our intercourse, and all the elements 
of our fate. The tangle may seem great at times, 
but it is all an immeasurable pattern, a spreading, 
many-colored figure. And the figure, when it is fin- 
ished, will be a magnificent harmony. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 301 

Oswald. He is exalted ! 

Camilla. C'est tres-joli. 

Belinda. If I'm only an unconscious, irresponsible 
shuttle, and it doesn't matter where I am, I think I 
won't, after all, go home. 

Darcy. I don't care where you go. The world is 
ours ! 

Clifford. Yes, our common mind is to swallow it 
up. But what about our common language ? 

Belinda. This is Clifford's great question. 

Darcy. How do you mean, what about it ? 

Clifford. Do you expect Belwood and me to learn 
American ? 

Belwood. It is a great question. 

Darcy. Yes, if you like. 

Clifford. Will it be obligatory ? 

Darcy. Oh, no, quite optional. 

Oswald. What do you mean by American ? 

Clifford. I mean your language. (To Darcy.) You 
consider that you will continue to understand ours ? 

Belinda. The upper classes, yes. 

Camilla. My dear, there will be no upper classes 
when we are all little drudging bobbins ! 

Belinda. Oh, yes, there'll be the bobbins for silk 
and the bobbins for wool. 

Camilla. And I suppose the silk will be English. 

Oswald (to Clifford). What do you mean by my 
language ? 

Clifford. I mean American. 

Oswald. Haven't we a right to have a language of 
our own ? 



302 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

Darcy. It was inevitable. 

Clifford (to Oswald). I don't understand you. 

Belinda. Already ? 

Clifford. I mean that Oswald seems at once to re- 
sent the imputation that you have a national tongue 
and to wish to insist on the fact that you have it. 
His position is not clear. 

Darcy. That is partly because our tongue itself is 
not clear as yet. We must hope that it will be clearer. 
Oswald needn't resent anything, for the evolution was 
inevitable. A body of English people crossed the 
Atlantic and sat down in a new climate on a new soil, 
amid new circumstances. It was a new heaven and a 
new earth. They invented new institutions, they en- 
countered different needs. They developed a partic- 
ular physique, as people do in a particular medium, 
and they began to speak in a new voice. They went 
in for democracy, and that alone would affect — it has 
affected — the tone immensely. Cest Men le moins (do 
you follow?) that that tone should have had its range 
and that the language they brought over with them 
should have become different to express different 
things. A language is a very sensitive organism. It 
must be convenient — it must be handy. It serves, it 
obeys, it accommodates itself. 

Clifford. Ours, on your side of the water, has cer- 
tainly been very accommodating. 

Darcy. It has struck out different notes. 

Clifford. He talks as if it were music ! 

Belinda. I like that idea of our voice being new ; 
do you mean it creaks ? I listen to Darcy with a cer- 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 303 

tain surprise, however, for I am bound to say I have 
heard him criticise the American idiom. 

Darcy. You have heard me criticise it as neglect- 
ed, as unstudied : you have never heard me criticise 
it as American. The fault I find with it is that it's 
irresponsible — it isn't American enough. 

Clifford. C ''est trop fort ! 

Darcy. It's the candid truth. I repeat, its diver- 
gence was inevitable. But it has grown up roughly, 
and we haven't had time to cultivate it. That is all 
I complain of, and it's awkward for us, for surely the 
language of such a country ought to be magnificent. 
That is one of the reasons why I say that it won't be 
obligatory upon you English to learn it. We haven't 
quite learned it ourselves. When we shall at last 
have mastered it we'll talk the matter over with you. 
We'll agree upon our signs. 

Camilla. Do you mean we must study it in books ? 

Darcy. I don't care how — or from the lips of the 
pretty ladies. 

Belinda. I must bravely concede that often the 
lips of the pretty ladies — 

Darcy {interrupting). At any rate, it's always Amer- 
ican. 

Camilla. But American improved — that's simply 
English. 

Clifford. Your husband will tell you it's simply 
French. 

Darcy. If it's simply English, that perhaps is what 
was to be demonstrated. Extremes meet ! 

Belwood. You have the drawback (and I think it a 



304 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 

great disadvantage) that you come so late, that you 
have not fallen on a language-making age. The peo- 
ple who first started our vocabularies were very na'ifs. 

Darcy. Oh, we are very na'ifs. 

Belwood, When I listen to Darcy I find it hard to 
believe it. 

Oswald. Don't listen to him. 

Belwood. The first words must have been rather 
vulgar. 

Belinda. Or perhaps pathetic. 

Belwood. New signs are crude, and you, in this 
matter, are in the crude, the vulgar stage. 

Darcy. That no doubt is our misfortune. 

Belinda. That's what I mean by the pathos ! 

Darcy. But we have always the resource of Eng- 
lish. We have lots of opportunity to practise it. 

Clifford. As a foreign tongue, yes. 

Darcy. To speak it as the Russians speak French. 

Belwood. Oh, you'll grow very fond of it. 

Clifford. The Russians are giving up French. 

Darcy. Yes, but l/iey've got the language of Tol- 
stoi'. 

Clifford {groaning). Oh, heavens, Tolstoi ! 

Darcy. Our great writers have written in English. 
That's what I mean by American having been neg- 
lected. 

Clifford. If you mean ours, of course. 

Darcy. I mean — yours — ours — yes ! 

Oswald. It isn't a harmony. It's a labyrinth. 

Clifford. It plays an odd part in Darcy's harmony, 
this duality of tongues. 



AN ANIMATED CONVERSATION 305 

Darcy. It plays the part of amusement. What 
could be more useful ? 

Clifford. Ah, then, we may laugh at you ? 

Darcy. It will make against tameness. 

Oswald. Camilla, come away ! 

Clifford. Especially if you get angry. 

Belinda. No, you and Belwood go first. We Amer- 
icans must stay to pray. 

Camilla (to Clifford'). Well, mind you come to Paris. 

Clifford. Will your husband receive me ? 

Oswald. Oh, in Paris I'm all right. 

Belinda. I'll bring every one. 

Clifford {to Camilla). Try "Mrs. Gibbs of Ne- 
braska," the companion-piece to " Mrs. Jenks." 

Oswald. That's another one you stole ! 

Belwood. Ah, the French and Germans ! 

Belinda {pushing him out with Clifford). Go, go. 
(To the others?) Let us pray. 



THE END 



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